Scott Davis has spent more than four decades immersed in South Carolina athletics, offering fans a unique, emotionally honest perspective. He pens a weekly newsletter throughout the year and writes a Monday column during football season for GamecockCentral.com.
For Davis, the end of the 2025 football season brings one overwhelming feeling: relief.
He describes the sensation dramatically — like shedding “40 pounds,” or being “released from the hospital after being bedridden for three months with a full-body rash.” In short, he says, “our long national nightmare is over.”
This year’s South Carolina football campaign, one of the most frustrating in modern program history, has finally closed. For fans, the silver lining is simple: They can choose to mentally flush the entire experience and never revisit it.
And Davis plans to do exactly that.
When the clock expired on South Carolina’s predictable 28-14 loss to a five-loss Clemson team, Davis felt a burst of joy. The thought that popped into his mind? He didn’t have to watch a game next Saturday.
“If only I’d realized that option was available to me back in September,” he jokes.
The season felt like an emotional siege — supplies dwindling, reinforcements nowhere in sight. Once the early College Football Playoff hype evaporated and bowl hopes crumbled, the only remaining expectation was simple:
Beat Clemson.
Especially since South Carolina hadn’t defeated the Tigers at home since 2013. But the universe did not oblige.
As they had all year — regardless of who was calling plays — the Gamecocks couldn’t score enough to finish games they were positioned to win. Once again, they entered the fourth quarter with a chance, and once again, they faltered.
And once again, they let opportunities slip away.
While fans can flush the season, Shane Beamer and his staff cannot. They now face the hard task of reliving the past few months, diagnosing what went wrong, and rebuilding for 2026. Major questions loom: hiring a new offensive coordinator, roster departures, and identifying whether the next starting quarterback is already on the team or must be found elsewhere.
To their credit, Davis notes, the players never quit — a sign of the culture Beamer has cultivated. In previous eras, a season like this would have fractured the locker room. That didn’t happen in 2025.
Still, the road ahead is steep. A 4-8 finish, 1-7 mark in the SEC, and another home loss to a middling Clemson team have shifted the narrative drastically. The national media who once hyped Beamer as a rising star will not be doing so next summer.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Davis writes, quoting Thomas Paine.
Beamer was hired in 2020 because he presented a compelling vision for the program’s future. Five years later, he enters the most difficult chapter of that mission.
Fans, meanwhile, can check out emotionally — at least for a while. Davis admits he’ll eventually be ready to examine coordinator options and roster reshuffling, but “that time is not right now.”
After months of football misery, he says, “I’m ready to eat again.”
Game Ball: To the Season Finally Ending
Because of a sixth straight home loss to Clemson — a team having one of its worst seasons in decades — there was only one Game Ball to award:
The season being over.
Two weeks earlier, after the Alabama meltdown, Davis suggested 2025 might go down as one of the program’s most disappointing seasons. Surprisingly, that became a point of debate among fans.
Many misunderstood “most disappointing” to mean “one of the worst teams ever.” And that, Davis clarifies, is not the case.
This group was not remotely close to being one of the worst South Carolina teams in history. Unlike truly dreadful squads from decades past, the 2025 group competed every week and stayed in games despite a brutal schedule.
What made the season so disappointing were the expectations.
South Carolina entered 2025 with unprecedented national hype. Sellers opened the year as a potential Heisman finalist and projected No. 1 NFL Draft pick. Analysts from ESPN and the SEC Network openly talked about the Gamecocks as College Football Playoff contenders.
And then?
4-8.
1-7 in the SEC.
No bowl game.
Another loss to Clemson.
A midseason coordinator firing.
A collapse at Texas A&M so shocking it will be remembered for years.
Given the buildup, how could this not be one of the most disappointing seasons ever?
Now, at last, it’s done.
Davis writes that he plans to flush this season — and “if one flush doesn’t do the job,” he’ll keep flushing until it disappears from memory.
But for Beamer and the athletic department, the true work is just beginning. As Davis puts it:
“May the Lord bless and keep them.”
