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: In Sports, Transparency is Everything
I don't have a Heisman Trophy vote.
If I did, I'd likely have voted for Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza, who was this year's winner. And when I voted for him, I would then have made my vote public, letting the world know that I'd given him my support and even offering the reasons why I thought he deserved the honor.
But here's the interesting part: I wouldn't have had to make it public.
In fact, I could've kept not just my reasons for selecting Mendoza but my vote itself a secret. I would have had to tell no one who I'd chosen or why. I could have had input into a process that is very much in the public interest, that millions of Americans care about, that can positively impact the financial future of the winners – and I could have done it all in complete and total privacy.
And knowing that my vote would never be made public, I could have done something really off the wall. I could have voted for South Carolina's second-string punter to win the Heisman. I could have voted for Cade Klubnik to win the Heisman. I could have just decided not to vote for Mendoza because I thought everyone else was going to, or because I'm secretly a Purdue fan, or because I didn't like Curt Cignetti.
My vote would have been just one of hundreds, and it likely wouldn't have made a difference.
But it could have.
Secrecy allows for anything to happen.
And that's how we wound up this week with the absurd development that occurred during the Pro Football Hall of Fame's announcement of this year's inductees. According to sources, six-time Super Bowl-winning coach Bill Belichick will not gain admission to the Hall in his first year of eligibility.
In the century-long history of the NFL, just one coach – Don Shula – has won more games than Belichick. No one has won as many Super Bowl titles.
But he's not a first-ball Hall of Famer. And do you want to know why?
Because not enough members of the selection committee like him.
Accomplishments or Affability?
In the annals of professional sports, few figures have been less adored than the surly, taciturn Belichick.
The owner of the New England Patriots – Robert Kraft, who employed Belichick for two decades – is not a fan. Neither is his longtime quarterback, Tom Brady (merely the greatest professional football player of all time). Many of his former coaching associates speak carefully about him, if they speak about him at all.
After Belichick surprisingly took over at the University of North Carolina before the 2025 season, many Tar Heel players quickly began to grouse about his coaching style, and it's fair to say that the Heels' struggles this past year represented a feel-good story for most American sports fans (including me).
Based on all the available evidence – including 20 years' worth of rude press conferences – I've come to the conclusion that I probably don't want to be friends with Belichick, and as a lifelong UNC hater, nothing would please me more than watching him be responsible for sinking that program in Chapel Hill like the Titanic.
But we don't elect people to the Pro Football Hall of Fame – or any hall of fame – based on whether he's a good guy. We elect them based on what they accomplished.
Love him or hate him, no coach ever accomplished more in professional football than Bill Belichick. If he's not a first-ballot hall of famer, no one is. If he's not in the Hall of Fame as soon as he can be in it, there doesn't need to be a Hall of Fame.
And if no one has to answer for how we make the biggest decisions in sports, then we wind up with results that don't make sense.
Transparency Matters
I know what you may be thinking.
Who cares? Belichick will get in eventually. They just wanted to make him sweat a little.
I care, and let me humbly make a case for why you should.
For too long in American sports, secrecy has been the norm rather than the exception. And secrecy makes things worse for sports fans – not better. Even in 2026, in a world where social media gives everyone a megaphone, we still know so little about many of the decisions that impact our enjoyment of the games.
Like the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the National Baseball Hall of Fame also inducts its members through a secret ballot. And although some of the voters share their votes with the public, they aren't required to, and many don't.
The College Football Playoff committee doesn't release the votes of its members, nor does it disclose what transpired during the decision-making process. Had the committee decided to select Notre Dame instead of Miami this season – as many fans feared they would do – we would have had no real idea how that decision was made or why.
It could have easily happened, and it would have prevented fans across the country from watching the Hurricanes make a run all the way to the title game against Indiana. Had it happened, it would've happened in secret.
The foundation of our willingness as fans to invest so much emotion into sports is that we believe the system is fair, that there's accountability, that the rules apply to everybody, and that those rules make sense.
That's why so many fans I've talked to over the last five years have told me that they no longer love college sports quite as much as they used to.
Like me, these fans still love their South Carolina Gamecocks and always will.
But the changes that have emerged in college sports over the last few years seem to have dropped out of the sky: We know that court decisions impacted the way the games are now being played, but we don't know how we arrived at this bewildering system.
Who decided how we got here? Why didn't they have to make a public case for it? Why does it seem like no one has to answer for what's happened to college sports?
It feels, to us, like these decisions were made in back rooms by faceless entities who will never have to explain to us why things now operate the way that they do.
These kinds of things can happen in sports because, in sports, transparency has never been the standard operating procedure.
Secrecy has.
Some things, alas, never change. Just ask Bill Belichick.
Tell me what you think about the lack of transparency in sports by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com. (Please do not reply to this email.)
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