Scott Davis: Long Day’s Journey Into Night
By: Scott Davis - Gamecockcentral.comIt had already been the longest of days for yours truly by the time I got to the second half of the Auburn-Alabama game on Saturday afternoon.
My wife and I had made a gruesome three-hour drive from South Carolina to Atlanta in stop-and-go post-Thanksgiving traffic that left both of us contemplating strangling each other and/or pulling the car over to the side of the road and wandering into the Interstate.
The very second we arrived home – tired, hungry, dazed and questioning life’s meaning – we started pulling out our Christmas decorations from the garage. Thanksgiving traffic plus Christmas decorations is a deadly back-to-back combo for a husband in the best of circumstances, a true spiritual backbreaker. Into that already seething cauldron, we mixed in the annual Clemson-South Carolina rivalry. Folks, that’s a lot of emotion to expend in a 10-hour timeframe.
Still, I was prepared for the moment.
That’s because we do this every year. Every November on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, we put up holiday décor that spreads the message of love, hope, good cheer and peace on earth, while watching the Gamecocks play their rivals and spread a message of exhaustion and inertia and disinterest.
We even have a Christmas tree that is – are you ready for this? – specifically dedicated to USC ornaments, and we bedeck the Gamecock tree during the Clemson game (yes, I’m cringing while I type this). I hesitate to admit that the outfit I wore for our annual tree decoration/rivalry viewing was a T-shirt with the face of Santa Claus on it, emblazoned with the phrase, “DON’T STOP BELIEVING.”
Don’t stop believing. Lord have mercy. I wish I could say I was making this up.
As night fell, in the moments before Clemson-South Carolina kicked off, I found myself captivated by the Iron Bowl between Auburn and Alabama.
The game made for a spectacularly compelling four hours, as it almost always does, becoming a Passion Play on the Plains that would emphatically deliver either complete and total ecstasy or abject despair, depending on your rooting interest. Euphoria or devastation, and there would be no in-between.
This game made you squirm, it made you pace, it made you talk to yourself.
There was a tragic nobility to Auburn’s fight. The Tigers were overmatched, reeling from a string of disappointing come-from-ahead losses, and facing the greatest coach and greatest college football program of all time. Yet they battled. They bled. Their weary, battered defense kept refusing to yield.
Auburn could have won, and indeed should have won. After the Tigers lost in quadruple overtime to Nick Saban and the Crimson Tide, the CBS cameras scanned the crowd at Jordan-Hare Stadium and kept finding Auburn fans with tears streaming down their faces.
So much life was on display here – the intensity of every single human emotion throbbed through that crowd.
True, I wouldn’t want to be an Auburn fan today. But as I watched that game, I couldn’t help but feel a flicker of hope as I got ready to stare down my own rivalry game: An underdog giving everything they had, taking it to a favored foe with desperation and vigor.
Could I expect the South Carolina Gamecocks to make a similar stand at the old stadium on George Rogers Boulevard, to battle and bleed as 11.5-point underdogs, to give their fans a reason to hope, to give them a reason to feel life pulsing through their veins again?
I could not.
As they so often do in this alleged “rivalry,” South Carolina delivered one of its worst performances of the season against their archenemies, meekly bowing down to the ugly tune of 30-0. Sadly, it was a familiar
scene.
That’s why there were no tears streaming down my face as this game closed. No SEC Network camera could find a Gamecock fan sobbing with heartbreak amidst the Williams-Brice crowd.
In contrast to the fervid, soap opera emotion on display in Auburn, this was a listless panorama of humdrum, rote deja vu. 30-0? Yep, must be the Clemson game.
I’m struck by how rarely this contest has felt like a true rivalry in the four decades that I’ve spent watching Gamecock football. On Saturday, you couldn’t help but notice how little this game had in common with Auburn-Alabama, and how much it instead felt like the 45-0 curb-stomping that Georgia handed to its in-state whipping boys, Georgia Tech.
But that was a game featuring the No. 1-ranked team in the nation facing a hapless squad entering the day at 3-8 (and soon to be 3-9).
Clemson-South Carolina, on the other hand, featured two bowl-bound teams that had both experienced weird stretches of inconsistency during the season. Yes, the Tigers are just a year removed from playing in their sixth straight College Football Playoff. Yes, the Gamecocks are just a year removed from posting a 2-8 record. These programs aren’t on equal footing at the moment, or even close to being so.
Still, shouldn’t we have been able to hope for more than 30-0 based on what we’d seen thus far in 2021?
Probably not, actually – not if we’re paying attention to the rivalry’s history. Year after year, this game is reliably uninteresting and tends to tilt in Clemson’s direction. Other than Oklahoma-Oklahoma State (which was shockingly won by OSU this year), it’s hard to find a well-known college football rivalry game that is more one-sided and less compelling than this one usually is. If you’re a Gamecock fan like me, it’s difficult to escape the feeling that this particular game doesn’t even deserve our attention until further notice. During their current 7-game win streak, Clemson’s average margin of victory has been 26 points (or nearly four touchdowns, if that helps put it in perspective).
If you’ve heard that old warhorse of a cliché – “you can throw out the record books for this game” – you don’t need to pay attention to it when South Carolina and Clemson play each other. The record books almost always tell us what’s going to happen.
Surprise, intrigue, shocking developments: These don’t happen in the Palmetto Bowl. You’d probably have to go back to 2009, when Steve Spurrier’s Gamecocks sprung a mild upset on a Clemson team heading to the ACC Championship, to find a game that felt like one of those classic rivalry stunners. Otherwise, this contest is usually as predictable as the sunrise.
And the sun – believe it or not – did rise on Sunday morning. It always does.
Why wouldn’t it? We’ve seen all of this before.
The “Um, At Least We’re Going to a Bowl Game” Game Balls of the Week
One Game Ball this week, to the following…At Least We’re Going to a Bowl Game? – I didn’t expect to be doing so this year. Did you?
Deflated Balls
Revenge of the Ugly Offense – South Carolina’s unexpected late-season wins over Florida and Auburn masked over the stark reality that the Gamecocks fielded the worst offense in the SEC other than Vanderbilt in 2021. If any of us were thinking that those wins might have taken some of the pressure off the offense as we head into the off-season, we can stop thinking that after 30-0. It’s time to open up the hood and take a long look at the engine after South Carolina compiled a meager 206 total yards against Clemson (and almost astonishingly, just 43 rushing yards) to go along with zero points.My Ridiculous “Don’t Stop Believing” T-shirt – I actually spent about 10 minutes Sunday morning trying to think of a less appropriate piece of clothing that I could have worn for the South Carolina-Clemson game than the “Don’t Stop Believing” T-shirt that I did wear. Given the history of this rivalry, I would have done better to wear a shirt that said, “Did I Ever Start Believing?” On the other hand, when we consider that my entire Saturday felt like an everlasting journey, there is some symmetry to the fact that it was the lyrics to a Journey song that ended up making me look so pathetic, silly and embarrassing.
Don’t stop believing? Are you kidding me? Hark the herald angels sing, man.
The more I think about it, it might be time for us Gamecock fans to find a new cheesy ‘80s classic to transform into our national anthem. I think “Don’t Stop Believing” may have run its course. Sorry, Journey.
So what’s left? “Hero Takes a Fall” by the Bangles? “Shadows of the Night” by Pat Benatar? “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler?
Hang on, let me look up the lyrics to “Total Eclipse of the Heart”: “Every now and then I get a little bit tired of listening to the sound of my tears/Every now and then I get a little bit nervous that the best of all the years have gone by/EVERY NOW AND THEN I FALL APART!!!/Once upon a time there was light in my life, now there’s only love in the dark/Nothing I can say, total eclipse of the heart…”
OK, yep, it’s official. “Total Eclipse of the Heart” is the new anthem. I’m glad we could figure that out together.
For yet another 365 days, we can press repeat on “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Will we ever get to hum another tune? Hey, a Gamecock fan can dream.
As the great Debbie Harry once sang, “Dreaming is free.”
Yes, it is.
Dreaming is free.
