Scott Davis: In an attention economy, few are buying these Gamecocks

Scott Davis has followed South Carolina athletics for over 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly newsletter year-round (sign up here) and a column during football season that’s published each Monday on GamecockCentral.com.

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I was chatting with my father-in-law Sunday morning in the wake of South Carolina’s sloppy, sluggish and thoroughly predictable 30-14 loss to Ole Miss the night before.

“I looked at the SEC Network’s wrap-up,” he said glumly, referring to the channel’s highlights show featuring all of the Saturday college football action from the conference. “I don’t even think they spent three minutes talking about us.”

And why would they? In the span of a single season, the Gamecocks have gone from “must-see TV” to “these guys actually look a little shaky” to “Wait, is their season still going on?”

Just two short months ago, the program was a national media darling, Coach Shane Beamer was building a resume as the platonic ideal for engaging a fan base in the social media age, and quarterback LaNorris Sellers was arguably the most recognizable face in the sport – a potential Heisman Trophy winner and number one pick in the NFL Draft.

Weeks later, it’s getting harder and harder to get ESPN’s analysts and talking heads to pay attention to the Gamecocks. And when they do pay attention, it’s not to lavish praise on the program.

ESPN color analyst Louis Riddick – who was calling South Carolina’s game against Ole Miss on Saturday night – spent much of the broadcast blistering the Gamecocks’ style of play and overall approach. When South Carolina was set to receive the kickoff to start the second half, Riddick went on what can only be termed a tirade, all but begging the team’s coaches to locate “an offensive philosophy that makes sense.”

Even play-by-play man Bob Wischusen seemed mystified by what had befallen the team since the duo called their opening game against Virginia Tech just a few weeks ago. The sad part is that the outburst from Riddick was probably the most focused anyone in the national media had been on the South Carolina program in a month or so.

In 2025, college football is very much part of the attention economy, where human attention is treated as a scarce and valuable commodity. Attention in college football will always ebb and flow based on who’s winning and losing, but the deadliest place to be in the modern era of college sports is a place where no one is talking about you, where social media feeds have run dry, where clips and soundbites about you are disappearing, when eyeballs are closing.

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Across the sidelines from the South Carolina team on Saturday night stood Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin, a winner both on the scoreboard and in the attention economy. In the attention economy, lots of consumers are buying what Kiffin is selling. Recruits and transfers are buying it. Ole Miss boosters are buying. Competing programs like LSU and Florida – both rumored to be angling for Kiffin’s services – are buying.

He’s getting ready to become the highest-paid coach in college football during the offseason. Why? In part, it’s because he’s resurrected a dormant Ole Miss program. But there’s much more to the story than that, because unless the Rebels win the national championship this year, Kiffin could become the game’s highest-paid coach despite never having won a title. He’s been fired twice as a head coach. His resume is strong – but it’s not Kirby Smart’s resume (or even Dabo Swinney’s).

Kiffin is a great coach, but he’s not a Nick Saban-like lord of dominance that swallows his foes whole. His teams have never played in the SEC Championship game.

But Lane Kiffin gets attention – a lot of it – and in 2025, a college football program needs attention like human beings need oxygen. It’s the lifeblood of a program in the world we now live in, the very air we need to breathe.

Shane Beamer seems to understand this. He’s done more than any other coach in my lifetime to sell the South Carolina program, to make Williams-Brice Stadium and Columbia a desirable destination for recruits, to make the national media pay attention to a program that has done little across its history to demand our awareness.

He’s good at social media, good at post-game interviews, good at all the intangibles like seeming fun and at ease and like a guy you’d enjoy having a beer with. And until this season, his teams have been utterly fascinating, too, even when they haven’t played particularly good football.

They were a free-wheeling wild bunch: You never knew what to expect from them. They might almost lose to Old Dominion at home but rout Oklahoma on the road. They might look utterly inert in a blowout loss to Florida, then absolutely drill the best Tennessee team in two decades. Anything was possible with them.

In past years under Beamer, even the Gamecocks weren’t playing well, they were interesting. They were the definition of must-see TV, for better or worse, like a crazy reality show that you sometimes hated yourself for being addicted to.

This year, we’re not addicted. It’s easy to turn away from them, to flip the channel, to turn the radio down, to scroll past the social media outrage about them to video clips of dogs swimming or little kids saying something funny. This year, our attention is drifting – going, going, gone.

And if there’s a single reason that it’s been possible for most of us to take our eyes away from the team this season (other than the obvious one that they aren’t winning many games), it’s been in the way they’ve conducted themselves offensively.

For the most part, watching this offense in 2025 has been a ponderous, often dull exercise, almost like sitting through one of those endless corporate PowerPoint presentations that you’re required to attend at the office. It’s become predictable and disheartening: Runs up the middle are bookended by sacks, false starts, and an occasional explosive play that seems to have dropped out of the sky.

A couple of weeks ago, I compared the experience of watching this offense to that of enduring a boring found footage horror movie, where almost nothing happens for two hours and then an exciting scene barges in out of nowhere. The comparison was never more apt than during the Ole Miss game, when LaNorris Sellers was sacked six times, the Gamecocks compiled an astonishingly measly 230 total yards of offense…and yet, somewhat inexplicably, there was also a 47-yard touchdown bomb from Sellers to Nyck Harbor that was such a perfect thing of beauty that it was hard to reconcile it coming from the same offense that generated all the rest of the ugliness.

Riddick’s long rant about how disjointed and downright strange the Gamecock offense looked on Saturday night was the most attention a national media member has given the program since the first couple of weeks of this season.

But it wasn’t the right kind of attention, and unless the Gamecocks shock the world by winning in College Station two weeks from now, this season will end without even a whimper.

Love it or hate it, in 2025’s college football, silence equals death.

And once the world stops listening to you, it gets harder and harder to make them hear you in the future.

The Taylor Swift Game Balls of the Week

I named the weekly Game Balls after Taylor Swift a few weeks ago, reasoning that she was having a better October than the South Carolina Gamecocks. She is now having a better November. And one thing she never lacks is attention. A Ball or two to…

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Riddick’s Intense Takedown of South Carolina’s Offensive Approach – If you were at the game and didn’t hear Riddick’s vocal blast (and God bless you if went all the way to Mississippi for this), you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that I don’t think I’ve ever heard an announcer this exasperated by what he was seeing from a team he was calling. For a few minutes, it almost seemed like he was channeling the collective unconscious of the South Carolina fan base in 2025.

Hugh Freeze – As disappointing as this season has been for South Carolina fans (and it’s hard to get much more disappointing than rising to No. 10 in the polls and hearing analysts talking about your College Football Playoff chances, only to free-fall to 3-6 with no end in sight), there’s been an astonishingly healthy competition within the SEC for “most disappointing season in the league” honors. Florida, LSU, and Arkansas have already fired their head coaches. Kentucky’s fallen apart under the once-smug Mark Stoops. And now Freeze’s Auburn might be trying to outdo them all.

Freeze has been on the “Probably the Next Guy to Get Fired” watchlist for weeks now, and after his Tigers lost to woeful Kentucky on Saturday, and as this is written, it’s hard to imagine him surviving to return for another season on the Plains. Turmoil is everywhere in the SEC, baby! Feel better?

Second Bye Weeks – A second Bye Week was introduced to the schedule in recent years, and I’ve never been happier to see it.

The Blair Witch Project Deflated Balls of the Week

Another game, another found footage horror movie on offense. Let’s do this!

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Sacks – Ole Miss collected a season-high six on Saturday night. If your defense needs to boost its sack totals, look forward to seeing the South Carolina Gamecocks coming up on the schedule. Throughout the year, we’ve heard the sack-fest blamed on poor protection from the offensive line, Sellers’ penchant for holding on to the ball too long, and even missed blocks from backs and tight ends and receivers. Seems like it’s been a team effort, and it’s making it impossible for the unit to find any semblance of a rhythm.

Statistics – Throughout the game, Wischusen kept reading statistics about the South Carolina offense that seemed to genuinely bewilder and confound him. “Folks, this is only the 18^th time this South Carolina offense has reached the red zone this entire season,” he blurted in profound amazement at one point. He and Riddick also seemed stunned to learn that the Gamecocks were the only offensive unit in the entire FBS to have never gained as many as 350 yards of total offense in a game this year. When Sellers scored early in the first half, Wischusen noted, “This is only the ninth touchdown he’s accounted for this year,” almost as though he was reading it as a question. It almost felt like Riddick and Wischusen were going to need PTSD counseling after calling this game.

South Carolina’s Offensive Series at the End of the First Half – After securing an interception with roughly 90 seconds left in the first half and desperately needing an offensive spark, the Gamecock offense trotted on the field and proceeded to run the absolute opposite of a two-minute drill. They ran directly up the middle into the teeth of the Ole Miss defense. They huddled nonchalantly as time bled away. They left timeouts sitting on the table. And before you knew it, the half was over, nothing had happened, and the comeback never came.

It was exactly the kind of offensive series, in fact, that you could easily flip the channel away from, and it was of a piece with what we’ve seen from the unit all year. That’s a problem.

Because in 2025, the five words that matter most for any college football program are, “Do I have your attention?”

And for the South Carolina Gamecock football team, the answer to that question is a troubling one.

Tell me how you feel after the Ole Miss game by writing me at [email protected].

THE INSIDERS FORUM: See what other Gamecock fans are saying about the Ole Miss game