South Carolina football: Keep calm and settle in for the stretch run

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.

Sometimes, I wonder why anyone bothers to speculate on an ongoing college football season.

Should we just pass a law today that makes it illegal to talk about what’s happening during a football season while it’s still happening? Things change so quickly and so profoundly and so ridiculously that it’s a wonder any of the leading analysts and opinionators are able to maintain a job for longer than 15 minutes.

No one knows what’s happening, not really, not even with all the numbers and all the stats and all the rock-solid analytical predictions and percentages.

And for regular old fans like us? We have about as much business trying to forecast what’s next as we do teaching a graduate-level class on the Principles of Microeconomics, so little do we actually have any idea about what’s getting ready to happen.

As much as all of us have made about the sheer, spectacular unpredictability of South Carolina football during the Shane Beamer Era, college football itself is what’s genuinely incomprehensible right now.

Let’s start with South Carolina’s 2024 football schedule, shall we?

Before the season began, all of us – and I do mean all of us – looked towards the month of October with deep foreboding and extreme gravity. October was going to be when the rubber met the road, when the story was told, when the die was cast.

Ole Miss at home. Alabama on the road. Oklahoma on the road.

South Carolina would either make a stand or be overwhelmed like driftwood amidst a tidal wave. October was the test, and it would make or break the 2024 season.

Just a month ago, when we stepped out onto the shores of the first of two Bye Weeks in 2024, I wrote a column in which I compared the middle portion of the schedule – the October Onslaught – to the second film in a movie trilogy. October represented “The Empire Strikes Back” or “The Dark Knight” for our Gamecocks. How would our heroes respond at the moment of their greatest peril?

A couple of weeks later, that neat and tidy summation of the current season has been scrambled like eggs in a Waffle House.

Ole Miss, while still potent offensively, no longer appears to be a legitimate College Football Playoff contender. Defending SEC champion Alabama lost twice in October and the Tide have struggled just enough in the post-Saban Era to get the notoriously entitled Bama fan base ready to start sharpening pitchforks.

Meanwhile, Oklahoma (which appeared in the College Football Playoff as recently as 2019 and started the preseason ranked No. 16) has fallen completely off the map in their first season as a member of the Southeastern Conference. After collapsing in Oxford on Saturday, the Sooners have lost four SEC games before November has even arrived.

On the other hand, this last phase of the schedule, the phase that looked at least somewhat more manageable when we glanced at it back around Labor Day, is suddenly beginning to loom as a gauntlet every bit as arduous as the one South Carolina just completed (and maybe even more).

When we all last convened here during the first Bye Week to take stock on where we’d been and where we were going, we didn’t know what we didn’t know.

As September closed, we still didn’t know much of anything about Texas A&M under new coach Mike Elko. Since then, the Aggies have reeled off win after win, and after a come-from-behind victory over LSU in College Station on Saturday night, A&M now stands at 7-1 and is the lone program that is still undefeated in Southeastern Conference competition. Guess where their next game is located? (I’ll give you a hint: They open games by playing “2001” there).

As September closed, Clemson appeared to be continuing its slow decline from the glory days of the 2010s. But as October closes, the Tigers have surged into the Top 10 amidst a series of dominating offensive performances. South Carolina gets to finish its season on the road against that program, in case you’d forgotten.

Missouri – which the Gamecocks play on November 16 – looks slightly less formidable than they did at the beginning of the season, but then again, they’ve still won six football games. And Vanderbilt? Forget about it. Since we last did this Bye Week thing, the Commodores took down mighty Alabama, beat South Carolina nemesis Kentucky and nearly defeated Texas (which was ranked Number One in the nation a little over a week ago). What the @#$% is going on in Nashville?

We thought if we could merely survive October, we’d have a chance to thrive in November. But the October Onslaught has simply given way to the November Knockout.

And we still don’t know what we don’t know. All that hangs in the balance is a bowl berth, the future of the Shane Beamer Era and an epic battle between the forces of good and evil.

So keep calm and carry on, friends. The stretch drive has arrived.

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What Just Happened?

Considering everything we just stipulated above, it’s worth wondering whether we even need to bother taking stock of what South Carolina just accomplished in October.

But since most of us like to believe we can make sense of chaos and confusion, let’s take stock anyway. It’s good for our emotional well-being.

As October dawned, I wrote that a satisfactory result for the Gamecocks in that month would be for them to win one of their three games and look competitive in all three. That is more or less what happened, though I will definitely hear and perhaps listen very intently to arguments that South Carolina was not competitive in its head-scratching performance against Ole Miss.

Still, let’s accept that some positive things happened this month. South Carolina won on the road in Norman, something few teams have done historically: We’re just not accustomed to seeing the Sooners get walloped that thoroughly by anyone inside the confines of their own stadium.

South Carolina very nearly – and probably even should have – won in Tuscaloosa against an Alabama team that featured many of the key players that won the SEC last year. And if we allow ourselves to stretch back into September and take into account the Gamecocks’ battling LSU to the wire in Williams-Brice Stadium, it should be obvious to all of us that we are rooting for a team that is capable of competing with and even beating just about anyone on any given Saturday.

How will that team handle A&M, Clemson and (I can’t believe I’m saying this) Vandy?

[Win two tickets to the South Carolina-Texas A&M football game]

Time to Take Offense

Can the Gamecocks make it through the November Knockout without a few strong showings by the offense?

I’m inclined to say no.

Of course, South Carolina just defeated Oklahoma 35-9 despite being outgained in Total Yards by the Sooners, so anything’s possible.

But as well as the Gamecocks are playing defensively – and can we have a warm round of applause for Clayton White’s unit, please? – they’re getting ready to match wits with some intriguing offensive heavyweights.

Texas A&M runs the football as well as anyone in the SEC. Does South Carolina’s defense – which specializes in causing havoc, creating disruption and attacking the passer – have the answers for a bruising attack or for the elusive Marcel Reed at quarterback, who stepped into the spotlight against LSU and ran wild over the Tigers?

More challenges loom: Clemson suddenly seems to be lighting up the scoreboard, the Gamecocks just simply haven’t matched up well with Missouri’s offense in recent years no matter who’s been playing for either team, and no one really knows what to expect from Vanderbilt at this point.

Won’t South Carolina need to make something happen offensively – and maybe even make a lot of things happen – to succeed over the next few weeks? You would certainly think so.

Then again, South Carolina 35 – Oklahoma 9.

We don’t know what we don’t know. On the other hand, here’s what we do know…

The SEC is Deeper Than Ever

We’d all agree with the following, right? The Southeastern Conference has been, by far, the most dominant and potent force in college football for at least the last 20 years. No one could – or would – seriously dispute this.

But if there’s been a knock against the league over the last few years, it’s been that its handful of most powerful teams (Alabama, LSU, Georgia) have masked the reality that there have been quite a few mediocre programs filling out the lineup. South Carolina, sadly, would have been included among the also-rans.

No longer.

In 2024, it feels like just about anyone in the SEC could beat just about anyone anywhere. With the exception of an undeniably struggling Mississippi State, everyone else in the league rises to the level of “pretty darn good, and to be honest, I really wouldn’t want to play them right about now.” Including your South Carolina Gamecocks.

No one, for example, considers Arkansas to be a contender to win the SEC. And yet the Razorbacks have routinely been posting offensive performances of 500 or more – and sometimes even 600 or more – total yards per game. Would it shock you to see Arkansas (or Kentucky or South Carolina or almost anyone in the conference) defeat someone like Oregon or Penn State or Ohio State? It shouldn’t.

Many of us believed the rise of the Transfer Portal and the infusion of cash from NIL deals might result in a top-heavy game in which the same five teams dominated annually. And that may still happen, because as noted above, nobody knows anything.

But for now, the SEC’s teams all seem to be rising to meet the challenge. And with the expansion of the College Football Playoff, we could be nearing a result in which a three-loss SEC team still wins the national championship. Under the old system, an absolutely loaded team – like last year’s Georgia squad – could lose a single game and be denied an opportunity to play for a title. That won’t happen again.

Let’s put it this way: If Tennessee were to work its way into the Playoff this year, would you be stunned to see them win a title? You wouldn’t. That’s because anyone from the SEC can beat anyone anywhere.

That makes an already difficult November for South Carolina even more difficult.

Then again, the Gamecocks are one of those teams that could beat anyone anywhere.

And who knows? Maybe they will.

Tell me how you’re feeling about the November Knockout by writing me at [email protected].