Scott Davis: The Swain train, unsatisfying victories, old man yelling

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 watching College GameDay on Saturday morning when something caught my eye on the ticker at the bottom of the screen.

Greater than 99%.

The figure had already scrolled offscreen by the time I realized what I was looking at. South Carolina’s win probability against the South Carolina State Bulldogs for Saturday’s game in Williams-Brice Stadium was listed as being more than 99%.

More than 99%.

Friends, that’s high.

Now, math was always my worst subject in school, but if my calculations were correct, anything much more than 99% would be right around 100%. Essentially, our Gamecocks had no meaningful chance of losing the second football game of the year in the matchup with our friends from Orangeburg.

If you believe in all of the probabilities and statistics and analytic formulations and Las Vegas forecasts, then probably the only thing that could have stopped South Carolina from winning on Saturday night would have been an Act of God.

As it turned out, an Act of God is exactly what we got. Lightning rumbled through the Columbia area as kickoff approached, placing the game under one of those deadly lightning delays that always have the potential to stretch on towards infinity. Torrential rainstorms – bringing flash flood warnings with them – followed.

It had already been a hot and muggy day in the Palmetto State, with temperatures reaching the 90s in the Capital City. If the South Carolina State Bulldogs didn’t have the players to shut down the Gamecocks, maybe the elements could pitch a shutout instead.

Or maybe they wouldn’t have to.

When this thing finally kicked off at nearly 9:30 p.m. Eastern, feeling every bit like one of those West Coast games that pop up on TV in the middle of the night, more than the weather and the universe and the heavens seemed to be working against the Gamecocks.

Right out of the gates, No. 10 South Carolina was beating itself, too.

After doing just enough to subdue Virginia Tech in a huge win to start the season in Atlanta, the Gamecocks embarked upon a first quarter that was uglier than the weather had been, leaving a sellout crowd of restless fans murmuring in the stands. Those fans had been waiting since 2024 to watch their team play a game at home, and on Saturday night, they were forced to wait a few hours longer to see football get played at all.

After the Gamecocks piled up penalties and went MIA on offense, the first quarter ended with State actually leading the game against an SEC team with designs on the College Football Playoff. Wait a minute, wasn’t this supposed to be a “Greater Than 99%” game? If you’d been waiting all week to see South Carolina dominate somebody after struggling to tame the Hokies in Week One, you were waiting for a moment that never arrived.

Fortunately, lightning struck again.

With absolutely nothing good happening for the Gamecock offense and all life beginning to drain from Williams-Brice, South Carolina State made the regrettable decision to punt the football in the direction of Vicari Swain midway through the second quarter.

Swain, as you’ll recall, returned a punt 80 yards last week for an electrifying touchdown that finally gave the men in garnet and black some breathing room against Tech, and on his first crack at it on Saturday, he broke a tackle, swung towards the sidelines, started following blocks, and at that moment, no matter where you were watching the game, you could feel the collective swell of every other Gamecock fan in the world saying to themselves, “Oh Lord, he’s about to do it again.”

He did.

Touchdown South Carolina, touchdown Vicari Swain, and suddenly it was 7-3 Gamecocks in a game in which the home team had been a three-and-out machine on offense.

Minutes later, the Bulldogs found themselves punting again. After the ball was tipped and began rolling harmlessly towards Swain, I suddenly blurted, out loud, to myself, “Is he really going to do this again?”

Then he broke a tackle, swung towards the sidelines, followed some blocks and all the sudden it was 14-3, South Carolina, in a game that had been largely ruled by S.C. State.

That, apparently, is what “Greater Than 99%” win probabilities mean. You’re going to win the game even when you aren’t playing very well.

After a sluggish 38-10 win, the Gamecocks now stand at 2-0, which is precisely the very best record they could have compiled to this point in the season. They entered this game already in the Top 10, which is even better than many of us expected.

And yet there’s a light fog of anxiety that has begun to blanket the South Carolina fan base as SEC play and an important matchup with Vanderbilt looms next weekend.

Vicari Swain – who has almost unimaginably tied the South Carolina single-season punt return record after just two games – has seemed to bail his team out twice already. For now, this team and this fan base are all aboard the Swain Train.

But the Southeastern Conference is coming.

And he’s going to need some help.

The Vicari Swain Game Balls of the Week

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I’ll go ahead and say it right now: If Swain returns a punt for a touchdown next weekend, I’m giving strong consideration to naming the weekly Game Balls after him forever. For now…

Vicari Swain – What can you possibly do for an encore after seizing the momentum back to the South Carolina sideline during the season opener against Virginia Tech with a beautiful 80-yard punt return? You do it again the following week. And then minutes later, you do it again. Folks, Swain wasn’t even supposed to be South Carolina’s first option at punt returner this season. But I think it’s safe to say he’s found a home now.

Gamecock Fans Filling the Stands After a Two-and-a-Half Hour Weather Delay that Actually Felt Like It Was Two-and-a-Half Weeks Long – As the night wore on, and on, and on, and it started seeming like this game might not kick off before midnight if it kicked off at all, I began a thought exercise where I wondered just how many people might actually be in the stands whenever the game got going. Forty-five thousand? Twenty thousand? Less? Would the East Upper Deck be completely empty? Despite Gamecock Nation’s unbridled excitement for the first home of the year, it was hard for me to imagine that too many of those rain-soaked partisans would still be within the confines of Williams-Brice Stadium for a late-night affair. Instead, the game started with a largely full house that was ready to get rowdy…at least until the Gamecock offense went three-and-out on its first three possessions of the football game.

Dylan Stewart, Agent of Chaos – Thus far in the short 2025 season, it has seemed like Stewart has blown up a running play or forced a quarterback to scamper for his life every time the Gamecock defense needed a spark. He’s a true Agent of Chaos, a disruptive energy that opponents really can’t plan around.

The “I Waited Through a Long Winter, a Brutal Summer, a Lightning Delay and Torrential Downpours for THIS???” Deflated Balls of the Week

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On a night when the final score read South Carolina 38 – South Carolina State 10, it somehow still felt like a Deflated Ball-filled affair, didn’t it? Deflators to the following…

College Football’s Strange Capacity for Generating Unsatisfying Victories – Back when I first started writing for Gamecock Central some 10,000 years ago, I identified, outlined and analyzed one of my least favorite occurrences during each college football season.

Wins That Feel Like Losses.

College football is the only sport being played anywhere in the world in which Wins That Feel Like Losses occur on a regular basis. In every other sport, when your team wins, you feel good about it. There are no conflicting feelings – you’re simply happy to have won. College football is, I think, unique in that you often feel ambivalent – and sometimes, even despondent – about games in which your team defeated another team. Why?

It’s because there are more than 360 football teams participating at the Division 1 level, and only about 30 to 40 of them have most of the top-tier talent. Over the course of a 12-game schedule, this imbalance creates mismatches that lead to outcomes where a team can enter a game having a “More Than 99%” win probability from the oddsmakers. Talent imbalances exist in college basketball and baseball, but there is much more parity in those sports, and it’s not at all unusual to see smaller schools defeat teams from power conferences.

But in college football, when your program schedules a quote-unquote “easy” game, you want it to feel easy. Fans can sense that their team has better players than their opponents, and that sensation creates outsized expectations – we want to see our guys crush these teams, fire on all cylinders, empty the bench by the third quarter and get lesser-known athletes involved. When that doesn’t happen, dread sets in, and you start looking at the remaining schedule and thinking things like, “Wait a second, if we couldn’t block S.C. State’s defense, what are we going to do against Vandy and Missouri, much less Oklahoma and Texas A&M?”

These kinds of thought exercises are pointless – we learn anew each season that how the team plays one week is rarely indicative of what they’ll do the following week. Just last season, the Gamecocks nearly lost at home to Old Dominion and then turned around and went on the road to rout SEC rival Kentucky. Still, Wins That Feel Like Losses can sometimes turn a fan base in the wrong direction during any given season if they’re not quickly followed by a series of stronger performances. Here’s hoping those performances start next Saturday.

The Offensive Line/Running Game Conundrum That Always Seems to Be Threatening to Pull Us All Into a Vortex Every Freaking Season – It’s baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack! At least after two games.

South Carolina’s Dismal Start on Offense – Three consecutive three-and-outs against the MEAC’s South Carolina State is not what you were hoping to see from the Gamecock offense after an uneven Week One performance against Virginia Tech. The passing game only seems to be working in fits and starts, with quarterback LaNorris Sellers rarely having much time to set up his progressions. Meanwhile, the running game was all but nonexistent against the Bulldogs. As for the push upfront? Time to get this machine humming.

ESPN+, SEC Network+, All the Pluses – This is the part where I sound like I’m 175 years old, like I’m auditioning to be one of those characters in a Progressive Insurance “Young Homeowners Turning Into Their Parents” commercial. But I actually remember a world in which you didn’t get to watch every South Carolina football game on television. You’re not going to believe this, kids, but for some of the lesser matchups each season, you either had to go to Williams-Brice Stadium or sit on the floor in your den beside an extremely large speaker and listen to another person tell you what was happening in the game. I’m not kidding.

About a decade or so ago, all of that changed. Blissfully, every game suddenly became available to the viewing public. If the South Carolina game wasn’t on CBS (and it probably wasn’t), it was on ESPN or ESPN2 or ESPNU, or the SEC Network, and if all else failed, it was on the SEC Network’s alternate channel, to be located somewhere on the Guide of your television screen.

Now that’s changed again.

The advent of the ESPN+ streaming service has dissolved the “alternate channel” backup plan, and now you need an app to watch these games against lesser opponents, which theoretically shouldn’t be that difficult in the technology-drenched Year of Our Lord 2025. And yet for many of us, it seemed to be.

I was away from home and trying to pull up the game on my phone without luck – my television carrier had changed since the last time I’d used the ESPN app, leading to frustrating sessions with the ESPN tech support team (who basically told me “We can’t help you, contact your TV provider”). I eventually was able to pull it up on a laptop, but not before getting a phone call from both my Dad and my wife (both of whom had some struggles finding it). Before kickoff, I glanced at a Gamecock Central message board for a few moments, where dozens of fans had voiced similar frustrations. It almost made me nostalgic for the days of radio.

For now, Shane Beamer’s Gamecocks are 2-0 – right where we hoped they’d be.

But the Vanderbilt Commodores are coming to Columbia in a few days. They’re fresh off a 44-20 drilling of Virginia Tech (in Blacksburg, no less), which you might remember being the team that hung with South Carolina for four long quarters in Atlanta.

And as much as we’ve all enjoyed an exhilarating ride on the Vicari Swain Train, it’s time for the rest of the team to leave the station.

Tell me how you’re feeling after an uneven win in Week Two by writing me at [email protected].

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