Scott has followed South Carolina athletics for over 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly newsletter (this email) year-round and a column during football season that’s published each Monday on GamecockCentral.com.
Scott Davis: Gamecocks Are Walking That Fine Line
It’s easy to forget just how different it all might have been.
More than four months after the dust settled on a disappointing, program-rattling 4-8 season for South Carolina football in 2025, most of us have already given a definitive verdict on that lost year.
We know everything we need to know about the 2025 season.
It was an unmitigated step backward. It was a belly flop. It was a 12-car pileup on a traffic-clogged interstate. Indeed, the person writing this very newsletter has even gone so far as to call it one of the most disappointing football seasons among many disappointing seasons in South Carolina history.
Despite that being a mildly controversial opinion amongst Gamecock fans, it’s one I still stand by. Given the expectations surrounding the start of the ‘25 season – including Playoff chatter, Heisman Trophy talk and a Top 10 ranking by Week Two – to drop all the way to near the basement in the SEC, fail to even make a bowl game and lose again to an archrival struggling through its worst season in 20 years was certainly a comedown for which there is little precedent.
And yet, as coach Shane Beamer reminded us this week, it didn’t have to end up that way.
Despite going 4-8, the Gamecocks were rarely run out of the stadium by their formidable opponents. They not only competed each and every week, but they also had legitimate opportunities to win most of the games in which they played.
Nearly every lost football game – from Alabama to Missouri to LSU to Clemson – was at least somewhat in doubt in the fourth quarter.
In SEC football, there’s a fine line between 4-8 teams and 8-4 teams, and South Carolina walked that line most of the year in 2025.
Unfortunately, they almost always found themselves on the wrong side of it.
Collapsing Down the Stretch
It’s easy to romanticize South Carolina’s unexpectedly triumphant 2024 season, especially after the follow-up to it went so poorly.
We remember those 9-3 Gamecocks as an electric, athletic, and entertaining bunch, led by a veteran defense that suffocated most of its foes. And yet that particular edition of the Gamecocks often found themselves in the fourth quarter with the football game on the line, too.
The difference between ’24 and ’25 was that the 2024 team made plays in the fourth quarter to win tight matchups.
They did it against Missouri. They did it against Clemson. They transformed a nail-biter against Texas A&M into a second-half romp. They parlayed a slender halftime lead against Vanderbilt into a runaway win.
The 2025 Gamecocks did the opposite.
They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory against an Alabama team that they’d left bleeding on the mat. They turned a fourth-quarter lead on the road in Missouri into a nine-point loss. They let a back-and-forth Clemson game slip away at Williams-Brice Stadium, where the 2024 team met the moment late in the fourth quarter and denied the Tigers.
And none among us will ever forget what happened to the 2025 team in College Station, Texas, when South Carolina made the wrong kind of history by squandering a 30-3 lead against the unbeaten Aggies, delivering A&M's largest comeback win ever.
Had even a couple of those games gone differently in the fourth quarter, the Gamecocks would have at least been able to salvage a bowl game in 2025 and continued the program’s momentum under Beamer.
But now, we enter the 2026 season facing existential questions about the future of the program.
It was that close to being an entirely different narrative.
Steaming Towards a Monumental Autumn
Beamer’s program puts the finishing touches on another spring practice this weekend, and I, for one, will miss the diversion it provided. Because now that the rest of us won’t have anything else to distract us until the season starts in September, we’re going to get back to doing what Gamecock fans do best: Worrying.
The anxiety is thick as summer creeps closer.
I’m not breaking any news by acknowledging that this will be a monumental fall for Beamer and his team. Entering his sixth season in Columbia, Beamer will need to show significant progress on the field to be in line for a seventh.
He knows it. But he also knows – better than the rest of us do – just how close his 2025 team was to salvaging its season.
“It was another great example of just how fine a line it is at this level, and winning and losing and the details of every game,” Beamer said this week. “The games that we won in the fourth quarter in 2024 for whatever reason, we just didn’t make those plays and coach well enough in the fourth quarter in 2025, and it cost us. I’ve heard me say it. I think it’s seven games that were one-score games going into the fourth quarter last season, and we didn’t play well in the fourth quarter.”
What if the Gamecocks make one more play to close out Texas A&M and ruin that team’s chance at a perfect season? What if South Carolina converts one offensive opportunity against Clemson in the fourth quarter to change the course of that game – much like in 2024 when LaNorris Sellers scampered into the end zone on third-and-16 with the clock ticking towards zero, putting his team ahead?
How differently are we feeling now, had those things happened?
The 2025 season may have felt like an endless disaster movie while it was unfolding, but in retrospect, it was one in which South Carolina always battled but rarely finished.
Cliches often become cliches for a reason.
And if you’ve ever heard an SEC coach utter the immortal line, “There’s a fine line between winning and losing in this conference,” well…after watching the 2025 South Carolina football season, now you know why that cliché is everlasting.
We won’t know if this edition of the Gamecocks will be finishers for another couple of months.
There will be plenty of anxious days while we wait.
Tell me how you’re feeling as spring practice closes by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com. (Please do not reply to this email.)
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