Scott Davis: It feels like we've been here before. But have we?

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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It feels different to me this time.

After a sluggish, sloppy and ultimately depressing 20-10 loss on the road at LSU, South Carolina stands at 3-3 at the halfway point of the 2025 season. Oklahoma’s up next. As it happens, 3-3 is exactly where the Gamecocks stood last year at this moment.

Right at .500, with some disappointing losses behind them and the Oklahoma Sooners coming up next on the schedule. Haven’t we been here before?

The 2024 Gamecocks, you may recall, then reeled off six straight wins, many of them electrifying, all of them satisfying. They became the talk of college football. They nearly roared all the way back from the abyss into the College Football Playoff itself.

All things considered, it was among the most exhilarating and joyful stretches of South Carolina football in my lifetime.

Why couldn’t it happen again? Coach Shane Beamer made the connection in his postgame press conference in Baton Rouge. “You draw on last year,” he said, “that we were 3-3, and we rallied and continued to get better. I know it’s not pretty right now, but I feel like we’re getting better in a lot of areas.”

I’ve been clinging to these types of hopeful scenarios myself in recent weeks, praying that a similarly miraculous turnaround might suddenly materialize, that we might still see the South Carolina team we thought we’d see back in the preseason, when the Gamecocks were a trendy Playoff pick amongst national analysts.

But deep in my heart of hearts, darkness is descending. I’ve got to admit it: It just doesn’t seem like the miracle is arriving in 2025. It doesn’t seem like the prayers are going to be answered this time.

Right now, the pressing issue for South Carolina isn’t winning out, or even winning seven or eight games. It’s getting bowl eligible.

The Gamecocks have just a single “expected victory” left on the schedule this year against Coastal Carolina. The Clemson game appeared to be trending as a win for South Carolina a couple of weeks ago, but now the Tigers seem to have righted the ship on offense, and we all know that game has tormented Gamecock fans for more than a century.

Even assuming South Carolina defeats its archrival and Coastal, they’ll still need to find a victory somewhere against the likes of Oklahoma, Ole Miss (on the road), Texas A&M (on the road) and Alabama. The cold reality is that 6-6 looks like a mighty difficult task, much less getting to the outside of a Playoff conversation like last year’s team did.

 If there’s a single reason why things feel bleaker this year, it’s that South Carolina just hasn’t looked particularly potent – or even consistently serviceable – on offense at any time in 2025.

The 2024 O wasn’t always electrifying, but they had moved the ball relentlessly in gut-wrenching losses to LSU and Alabama and seemed like a unit that could make things happen when firing on all cylinders.

This edition of the offense has yet to fire on all cylinders – not even for a quarter or two – to the point that we’re not even sure if it’s possible this year. Even when the Gamecocks have won this season, they’ve rarely looked in sync offensively.

You can check the stats if you need to – South Carolina currently ranks last in the SEC in total offense and at or near the bottom in every other major offensive category. The numbers don’t lie, but you don’t even need to consult them if you’re a Gamecock fan – you can feel despair building inside your body every time you watch the South Carolina offense jog onto the field.

On Saturday night in the most hostile college football environment in the country, the team had ample opportunities to escape with a program-defining road victory. The Gamecocks won the turnover battle and the time of possession war against LSU, yet still lost by two scores.

Consider that for a moment. LSU entered the game a sizable 9.5-point favorite and still covered despite turning over the ball more, losing the time of possession tally and being outrushed on the ground by the Gamecocks. That’s…hard to do in the SEC.

The South Carolina offensive line – which has struggled all season, and has seemingly struggled since I was born in the 1970s – has become a patchwork unit due to injuries, and wasn’t exactly pushing its foes backwards when operating at full strength. Quarterback LaNorris Sellers has had vanishingly little time to set up plays this season, and seems to be playing with less and less confidence as the weeks progress.

As if all that weren’t enough, the offense has consistently made life more difficult on itself with endless false starts and pre-snap penalties. Expecting this wobbly unit to suddenly catch fire and go on a run that would activate a 2025 winning streak seems like the height of wishful thinking.

So where do we go from here?

South Carolina’s next opponent ranks first in the conference in Total Defense, and they’ll be facing a Gamecock team that ranks last in the SEC in offense.

And despite that mismatch, the upcoming schedule is so brutal that this still might be one of the more winnable games left on the SEC slate.

Yes, 3-3 feels different to me this time. Very much so.

Time to send up a Hail Mary.

The Taylor Swift Game Balls of the Week

You know who’s having a good October? Taylor Swift, who got engaged and released an album in recent days that shattered all streaming records. I’d at least consider making her a blockbuster offer to become South Carolina’s offensive coordinator next season, because everything she touches turns to gold. And if this is the kind of production we continue to see from the Gamecock offense, my guess is that she’ll remain the namesake of our weekly Game Balls for the remainder of the 2025 season. How about a Ball to…

Officially Ending Any Remaining Possibilities of a Garrett Nussmeier Heisman Campaign – LSU’s quarterback – a preseason Heisman Trophy candidate – had already all but removed himself from the Heisman conversation with an underwhelming start to the 2025 season. If his candidacy was on life support entering the South Carolina game, we now have an official time of death for it. Though his overall numbers – 20-for-33 for 254 yards – were solid enough, he threw two more interceptions on Saturday and now has five for the season against just nine touchdowns. Considering how much he jawed and celebrated after the Tigers won a controversial game against South Carolina last season, I’m not at all unhappy that it was the Gamecock defense that was able to end whatever remained of his Heisman hopes.

That South Carolina also has a quarterback on its roster who entered the season as part of the Heisman conversation – and who is also not going to be walking across the stage to accept the trophy in New York City this December – is something we don’t need to discuss. What we do need to discuss is…

The Blair Witch Project Deflated Balls of the Week

If you’ve been reading this column for any length of time, you’ll likely recall that I often immerse myself in horror movies each October during the Halloween season, and indeed have written an unfortunate number of columns comparing the act of watching South Carolina football to the experience of viewing films about serial killers and demon possessions. And I hate to ring that bell yet again, but don’t we have to point out…

The Found Footage Quality of South Carolina’s Offense – Back in 1999, the movie “The Blair Witch Project” jolted horror fans out of the complacency we’d found ourselves in after more than a decade of slasher flicks and increasingly silly scenarios. Constructed as though it was made up of “behind the scenes” material being compiled for a documentary, it inaugurated a movement called “found footage,” which ended up dominating the horror landscape for the next 15 years and lingers on in various forms today.

At their best, found footage movies can be refreshing and creative and unique. At their worst, they’re just plain boring.

Even in the finest examples of the genre, like “Blair Witch,” nothing much seems to be happening in these movies for long stretches at a time. Tedium builds up and appears to be cresting towards some sort of crescendo – and then more tedium emerges.

Eventually, if the movie is at all good, some powerfully unsettling scene explodes out of nowhere, and it seems even more powerful because of the lackluster nature of everything you’ve seen come before it, and if it’s strong enough, it can make you forget just how bored you were for the previous hour-and-a-half.

And that’s the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that the movie starts boring and stays boring, and even the “explosive” scene gets forgotten amidst all the monotony, and you turn the TV off in an exasperated huff after an hour.

And that found footage vibe, my friends, is what it feels like to watch the South Carolina offense right – lots and lots of tedium, punctuated by the occasional explosive play, followed by more tedium. On Saturday night, the explosive play was a 72-yard touchdown run by Matt Fuller – an exciting burst that was surrounded by a whole bunch of false-start penalties, incomplete passes and not much else, to the point that it felt like we were watching unedited practice tape of the offense working on drills at Bluff Road.

Of course, we’ve seen these horrors before.

South Carolina’s offense has been in the doldrums for a decade now, since Steve Spurrier hung up the visor, and it’s hard to imagine them breaking out of the rut any time soon.

As for our chances to survive this 2025 season, it seems like we’ve seen that scenario play out before, too.

But have we?

Tell me how you’re feeling after a disappointing night in Baton Rouge by writing me at [email protected].

DISCUSSION: See what other Gamecock fans are saying about the LSU game