Scott Davis: Sunset on South Carolina's season

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.

---

For a brief moment, it was almost beautiful.

There it was, the old ballpark at George Rogers Boulevard as twilight settled in and shadows gathered.

The sun was setting at Williams-Brice Stadium, Saturday in South Carolina, complete with gorgeous fall conditions and the Gamecocks and the mighty Crimson Tide of Alabama battling each other to a wild, spectacular finish.

We hadn’t expected to be here, not just fighting for a chance but leading almighty Alabama in the fourth quarter. But here we were.

And now it was happening.

So many of us, those of us inside the stadium and those of us watching from home, had begun to believe in this moment.  We’d begun to feel it. This was going to be the moment when Shane Beamer’s team did it again, when they resurrected a season that had been left for dead, when they rose from the ashes one more time.

This was going to be the moment, and it would happen right here, right in this same stadium against the same team that 15 years earlier had been the sight of the beginning of Steve Spurrier’s rise to greatness at South Carolina.

And from my home, I was watching as the dusk illuminated our stadium with a bluish autumn glow, as the Gamecocks clung to an 8-point lead against the No. 4 team in the country, the most legendary and historic program in the game, with the Tide driving as the clock ticked under four minutes, then under three.

I believed someone would make a stop, pop a ball loose, make a play. I looked at this magnificent sight, and I believed.

It was indeed beautiful.

The South Carolina students were gathering in droves, heading towards the bottom of the stadium, preparing to rush the field like they’d done just a year ago when the Gamecocks rocked Texas A&M. In my mind, I envisioned a scene just like that one: Coach Beamer surrounded by a frenzied throng, yelling something like he did in that mob last year, when he screamed, “This is the greatest environment in college football!”

And then, in the dying light of a fall Saturday, it all fell away from us.

Alabama scored with just over two minutes remaining, then converted a two-point conversion to tie the game. And yet…

Still, the students came, pouring down towards the bottom of the stadium.

Still, our belief wouldn’t die.

LaNorris Sellers and the offense still had two minutes to finish. Hadn’t they done it in less time last year against Missouri? This could still happen, would still happen. Of course it would. This was what Shane Beamer teams do. This is why we’d fallen in love with Beamer’s program, because of these exact unexpected, shocking, beautiful moments.

And as the students jammed the lower rows, preparing for a mad rush that would never come, it happened.

A fumble, the Alabama offense jubilantly trotting back on the field, and a feeling that all life was slowly draining away from the stadium and the season itself.

We didn’t even need to watch the inevitable outcome.

When we saw the ball being ripped away from Sellers’ hands, and the Tide players hugging each other in celebration, we knew. We knew.

There would be no Lazarus emerging from the tomb this time.

The phoenix would not be soaring out of the ashes.

This season was not going to be resurrected, the way seemingly broken seasons had been in 2021, 2022 and 2024.

No, the sun had set on our dreams, this time completely, and though the Gamecocks still technically hold the possibility to reach a bowl game in 2025, most of us already believe that our hopes were fully dashed as the last bit of daylight was sucked into the sky on Saturday.

It had all been, for one brief, powerful moment, beautiful.

And then the darkness came.

Where Does it Rank in the Long List of Gut Punches?

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

Typically, I use this section of the column to hand out Game Balls and Deflated Balls to noteworthy performers and happenings, but when I woke up on a quiet Sunday morning the day after Alabama 29 – South Carolina 22, I was thinking about something else.

Just how crushing was this loss to a fan base accustomed to so much disappointment?

I’ve been following this program for decades, and have endured every type of South Carolina loss imaginable, from uncompetitive blowouts to nailbiters to upset losses to lower-tier FCS schools. I’ve seen the Gamecocks lose to The Citadel. I’ve seen them lose to their archrivals by 46 points. I’ve seen them collapse down the stretch in winnable games.

In short, I’ve seen it all when it comes to this football program and devastating losses. I have some practice surviving these types of defeats, unfortunately.

But as I reflect on it, I believe this is the most difficult South Carolina loss to absorb in a generation. I believe this is about as gutted as the fan base has felt in many years.

Shane Beamer’s teams lost two frustrating bowl games, one to Notre Dame and the other to Illinois, in recent years. Both were games that the Gamecocks had led for long stretches, and came after the team had electrified its fan base with thrilling wins down the stretch. Both, certainly, were disappointing.

But for me, the importance of bowl games has waned powerfully in recent years with the rise of the playoff and the wild proliferation of postseason contests. There’s no getting around the fact that they seem like exhibition games, and even while it would have been a nice cherry on top of the sundae for us to watch the Gamecocks win those bowls, it didn’t change our feelings about how much fun the 2022 and 2024 seasons had been.

Last year’s loss against LSU certainly had many of the same soul-crushing vibes as this one did, and it included some officiating shenanigans that were hard to swallow. But that game happened early in the season and was followed by stunning wins over Missouri, A&M and Clemson, which mitigated the pain.

This loss, on the other hand, had a chance to be the stunning win that would mitigate early-season pain. This was the chance to start the resurrection. And it didn’t come.

Other tough losses during the Beamer Era have been blowouts, like this year’s Vandy game or last year’s Ole Miss game, and blowouts just don’t have the capacity to devastate you the same way that down-to-the-wire losses do. Going back further, no individual loss during the Will Muschamp years felt this crushing, for the simple reason that hope was generally in short supply during those seasons.

Hope was alive and well here on Saturday. Because we’d seen Beamer’s team do the impossible time and again, we couldn’t help ourselves: We hoped. We even believed. And belief followed by breathtaking disappointment is the progression you need for true devastation.

I don’t recall any single loss during Steve Spurrier’s tenure that felt this painful. I was in attendance when the Gamecocks were rolled out of the Georgia Dome by Auburn in the SEC Championship Game, and while it was agonizing to lose what felt like it might be the program’s one opportunity to win the league, the Gamecocks were simply never competitive in the game and were outclassed from start to finish.

You didn’t walk away from it think “if this had happened and that hadn’t happened, we’d have won this football game.”

For me, I think you’d have to go all the way back to 2000, when the Gamecocks lost to Clemson in the final seconds on a deep bomb that also had the misfortune of being a clear penalty on the Tigers that inexplicably wasn’t flagged, to find a feeling of emptiness this complete. That 2000 team had briefly flirted with winning the SEC and had brought the program back from the dead after a winless 1999, so that loss was doubly gut-wrenching.

Saturday’s Alabama game felt like it could be the resurrection, the game that would set everything right.

Had South Carolina beaten the Tide, it would have kick-started another narrative about Shane Beamer’s powers for redemption, about how this program can no longer ever be counted out, and it would have nearly erased all of the heartbreak that has come before it in 2025.

Instead, the heartbreak was compounded a thousandfold.

And it all but ensures that there will be no redemption this season – a season that began with the Gamecocks ranked inside the Top 15 and tagged as a potential College Football Playoff team. Instead, this season could end with South Carolina missing the postseason entirely while a long-time doormat like Vanderbilt battles for a title.

It is for these reasons that I think we will live with this feeling for a very long time.

South Carolina now faces an offseason of uncertainty and upheaval, and possibly, turmoil. All of that might have evaporated had the Gamecocks finished on a beautiful fall Saturday in the blue twilight at Williams-Brice Stadium.

But they did not.

This time, there would be no resurrection.

Tell me how you’re feeling by writing me at [email protected].

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