Scott Davis: The sequel starts now

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.

Over the years, it’s become something of a truism among movie fans that the second film in a trilogy is usually the most interesting.

It’s when the stakes are the highest. It’s when the threats to our heroes are at their most fearsome, when the villains seem to have the most power, when the good guys must call on their all of their strengths and all of their skills.

Back when the “Star Wars” movies still just comprised a self-contained trilogy, “Empire Strikes Back” was the movie we cared about the most – that’s when we found out Darth Vader was Luke’s father and the Force actually contained a type of darkness.

In Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, it was “The Dark Knight” that seized our imaginations, when it seemed like the Joker might actually defeat the Caped Crusader and Gotham City would be plunged into chaos. In another memorable franchise, it was “The Godfather, Part II” that won the most awards and critical acclaim.

Telling stories via a trilogy works pretty simply: You set things up in the first movie, you resolve them in the last movie, but in the middle movie – the second one – you make the audience squirm and squeal and laugh and cry. The sequel is when you really capture their hearts, minds and souls.

And if we think of South Carolina’s 2024 football season as a trilogy that is neatly administered in three chunks – each of them separated by a Bye Week – then those first four games were the setup and the last five games will be the resolution.

These next three games? The October onslaught?

This is when the threats are the most fearsome and the villains seem to have the most power and the good guys must call on all of their strengths and all of their skills.

We all know what’s out there: Ole Miss at home. Alabama on the road. Oklahoma on the road.

This is the Joker of schedules, the Darth Vader of Octobers. This is supervillain territory. And the sequel to the 2024 season starts now.

As we emerge from the first of our restful and rejuvenating Bye Weeks, we confront the same types of existential questions that the heroes of a movie trilogy would be facing. Let’s try to find some answers for these questions, shall we?

[Win two tickets to the South Carolina-Ole Miss football game]

What Represents a Good Result for South Carolina Over These Next Three Games?

We watch college football differently than we did when I was a student at South Carolina. When I was 19 or 20 years old, you actually believed South Carolina could – and would – win every football game they played. It didn’t matter who the opponent was or how the Gamecocks had fared thus far in the season. You could be 0-4 and playing Peyton Manning’s Tennessee and still walk into Williams-Brice Stadium fully expecting a win. In those days, we genuinely believed in that “Rudy” stuff where if your guys played hard enough and wanted it more than the other dudes, you’d come out on top.

Now, in the Age of Analytics and with the rise of Vegas oddsmakers, we’re flooded with numbers that all but convince us not to even watch the games when the schedule gets rough. If you were to ask Vegas oddsmakers what the chances would be of South Carolina winning all three of these next games, they wouldn’t even give you a percentage – they’d simply drive to your home and repeatedly punch you in the face.

So while we all want South Carolina to win three straight games during October, and we’ll all be watching and supporting the team during this gauntlet, and we hope the players and coaches enter each contest fully believing in their capacity to emerge victorious, let’s stipulate that we’re not expecting three straight W’s.

To my mind, a good result this October would require two criteria to be met:

• South Carolina wins one of the three games
• The Gamecocks are competitive and acquit themselves admirably in all three

For instance, what if the Gamecocks survive a slugfest against Ole Miss in much the same way Kentucky just did, and win at home by something like a 28-24 score using turnovers and special teams to get a victory…and then lose the next two games by a combined score of 233-0? Are we feeling good for the final leg of the season? I don’t think so.

By the same token, if South Carolina hangs around and puts a scare in each and every one of the three next teams on their schedule, but still lose all three in a manner similar to the way they lost this year’s LSU game, there’s probably a small but vocal segment of the fan base that will start spreading messages of darkness and doom.

My prescription: Win at least one game, and show some fight in the others. (And since I started watching football 100 years ago when you still believed your team would win every game they played, why not just win all three?) Speaking of the next three opponents…

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Do We Care About the Results from the Bye Week?

Here’s another way that we watched football differently in the pre-Analytics Era: We cared about the way our opponents played just before they were supposed to play South Carolina.

If you had an opponent that was highly ranked or undefeated who was coming up on the schedule, for some reason you wanted that opponent to continue to play well right up until the time they played you. Your fervent hope – back in this superstitious age of college football voodoo – was that an overwhelming favorite would “overlook” you and coast into your game riding high, unaware of the sneak attack your team was about to perform.

Wasn’t this a crazy way to follow sports? (I’ll tell you a secret you might not be ready for: It was also a more fun way to follow the games).

Thus, 30 years ago, you absolutely would not have wanted to see a previously dominant team like Ole Miss losing at home to Kentucky right before they played South Carolina. Because that would have meant that the Rebels would now suddenly be “focused” and “hungry” when they arrived in Columbia rather than arrogant, fat, happy and sloppy.

These days, experts keep telling us that every game is a single universe unto itself, entirely unaffected by the happenings in the previous weeks, and that if South Carolina upsets Ole Miss this weekend, it will be entirely based on what happens during that game, and not what happened between Ole Miss and Kentucky, South Carolina and Kentucky, or anyone and Kentucky.

Experts would also tell us that Alabama’s electrifying win over Georgia on Saturday and Oklahoma’s unimaginable fourth quarter comeback over Auburn on the road will not inject either of those teams with some mysterious concept called “momentum,” which could derail South Carolina’s chance for upsetting either of them.

But I’m old. And frankly, I wish Ole Miss were coming into Columbia feeling fat, happy, arrogant and sloppy rather than desperate and hungry. Speaking of winning in October…

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What Can Fans Expect from the South Carolina Offense During the Second Segment of the Season?

Guys, I don’t know? Is that an acceptable answer?

Much will depend on whether starting quarterback LaNorris Sellers and starting running back Rocket Sanders will play meaningful minutes in the near future, or whether their respective ankle injuries will linger throughout the season. I suspect that South Carolina will not be able to rely on the series of quarterback runs they utilized to feast on an overwhelmed Akron last week when facing the Southeastern Conference defenses of Ole Miss, Alabama and Oklahoma.

Still, two positive signs seem to have emerged from an occasionally bewildering offensive output through the first four games. The first is that Greenville, South Carolina’s own Mazeo Bennett appears to stepped forward from the wide receiver room to claim the role as the offense’s go-to pass-catcher. Bennett will need help, so if the Gamecock passing attack is to take a leap in the second segment of the season, another option or two needs to materialize sooner rather than later at receiver.

The second heartwarming development for the O has been the unit’s ability to deliver knockout punches via the always tantalizing Explosive Plays (you know, the types of plays that eluded and tormented the Will Muschamp regime at South Carolina). Of course, Sellers and Sanders have been the most important cogs in the Explosive Play Machine thus far, so if those two are watching from the sidelines, whatever progress we’ve seen the offense make in this regard may stop on a dime.

To summarize what we’ve discussed regarding what we can expect from the South Carolina offense over the next three games: Guys, I don’t know? And we can’t look forward without first looking backward, which is why we need to ask…

Was the LSU Loss the Most Devastating South Carolina Football Loss in Recent Memory?

It was. This is both the short answer and the long answer.

In the wake of LSU 36 – South Carolina 33, I started receiving the types of yearning, heartbroken notes from readers that you’d typically associate with a historically star-crossed fan base that had just watched its team lose in overtime of the Super Bowl or in the seventh game of the World Series. (You can read my column from the LSU game here).

On the surface, this loss wouldn’t seem to be that much different from a host of other gruesome, gut-wrenching defeats that Gamecock fans have endured in more than a century of

supporting their school. Haven’t there been a ton of these across the decades?

There have. But when you start cycling through the ugliest South Carolina losses in your mind, you’ll quickly realize that this LSU defeat had some singularly unique characteristics that left us immersed in a despondency from which we’ve not yet snapped awake.

There were the obvious stakes: A national stage with College GameDay on campus, the need for a significant breakthrough in Year Four of the Shane Beamer Experience, the massive level of attention from elite recruits. There was the heavyweight championship fight element to the game: Both teams played as hard as they possibly could, wanted to win desperately and delivered some lethal body blows across four quarters. There was the sizable lead South Carolina compiled in the first half, igniting a level of enthusiasm across Gamecock Nation that we hadn’t felt since the Spurrier heyday.

And, of course, there was this: The empty, cheated feeling that we all felt after watching all the refereeing shenanigans that legitimately helped decided the game’s outcome. There was the undeniable sensation we’d received a raw deal.

Some losses – like when South Carolina inexplicably found itself losing to The Citadel after Spurrier’s hasty exit – just make you angry. Others – like all the pastings Clemson gave the Gamecocks during the Muschamp years – leave you feeling overwhelmed and exhausted.

This particular loss made you feel every single emotion you can feel, all the stages of grief at once. There was the obvious anger at the referees, the wistful “Why can’t it ever be our turn?” feeling, betrayal, sadness, pride at the effort the Gamecocks provided, respect for LSU’s unwillingness to lose. This game was an emotional Tilt-a-Whirl.

There have been many devastating losses for Gamecock fans through the lonely years, but as crazy as it sounds, I think you’d have to go all the way back a generation, nearly a quarter-century ago to the season-ending loss to Clemson in 2000, to locate a defeat that combined all of the elements this LSU game brought to bear upon us.

These are the types of things our movie heroes have to overcome when they reach the monumental, epic stretch they find themselves reaching in the second stretch of a trilogy.

They’ve already faced powerful challenges, and now the toughest part of the journey awaits.

Movie heroes, of course, always deliver in the face of overwhelming odds.

Here in the real world, football teams may not.

But for those of us who watch it all happen, we hope to see the good guys win just the same.

While we breathe, we hope.

Tell me how you’re gearing up for the sequel by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com.

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