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: Another Lost Year in Men's Hoops Feels All Too Familiar
I think I attended every home men's basketball game during my years as a student at the University of South Carolina.
I'm old now, and my memory's fading, so it's certainly possible that I missed a game or two across a years-long stretch. What I know for sure is this: Unless a full-blown emergency was going on somewhere else that required my attention, I was always at the old Carolina Coliseum watching South Carolina basketball.
I was there – game after game after game in support of a program that was mostly in the mediocre-to-bad range throughout my years in Columbia.
I saw it all. I saw the Gamecocks lose to UNC-Asheville. I was in the stands when they roared back from a 23-point deficit in the second half to stun an excellent Cincinnati Bearcats team.
I watched them lose to Georgia Southern. But I also watched them defeat Rick Pitino and the Kentucky Wildcats during a dream season in which head coach Eddie Fogler's upstart squad shocked the world and won what is still the school's only SEC title in men's basketball.
Speaking of Kentucky, I watched the Wildcats and Gamecocks play in what was South Carolina's very first game of major competition in the Southeastern Conference, when they were spanked by UK in the winter of 1992. I even remember how large the commemorative ticket stubs were – as well as how loud and annoying Big Blue Nation had been in invading the House that Frank McGuire built.
I was in that house during seasons when the Gamecocks squeaked into the NIT. I was there throughout the woeful Steve Newton Era when South Carolina couldn't even dream of the NIT, much less the NCAAs.
One year, a buddy of mine and I headed back to Columbia right after eating Thanksgiving dinner with our families merely so that we could watch the Gamecocks play a game in a year when the team wound up going 10-17. Why were we so committed?
At the time, it didn't seem shocking to invest all of that time and energy in a faded program.
It still felt like Gamecock fans – lots of them, just like me – cared about men's basketball, come what may. The McGuire years still felt close, still seemed consequential. It still seemed like this was a sport that South Carolina could excel in with the right leadership and care, so we kept showing up and hoping.
But now, after 50 long years since the peak of the McGuire Age when South Carolina has struggled to remain relevant and even visible in the sport, I'm beginning to wonder if I'll live long enough to see a resurrection come.
Long Fade to Black
After Lamont Paris' team fell to Florida in Gainesville on Wednesday night, the Gamecocks found themselves on the wrong end of a seven-game losing streak. The team is now 11-15 on the season and in last place at 2-11 in the SEC.
Once again, in what has become a familiar, frustrating feeling, we know that we won't be watching this squad compete in the NCAA Tournament. That shouldn't be at all surprising. The program has averaged around one Tourney showing per decade since McGuire's glory days – an absolutely staggering degree of ineptitude in reaching an expansive postseason that includes a whopping 68 teams.
The Gamecocks have made the tournament just five times since they joined the Southeastern Conference 34 years ago – needless to say, no one else in the league has fared as poorly in that stretch.
So entrenched have the team's struggles been during this particular lost campaign that its 76-62 loss to Florida on the road this week was viewed as almost being surprising in its competitiveness. That's because the Gamecocks lost by an unthinkable 47-point margin to the Gators last month in Columbia – a result that represented Florida's largest road win in its entire history in the SEC, as well as being tied for the worst in-conference home loss in SEC history.
This is a program that's making the wrong kind of history.
But what's worse than the ugly beatdowns and embarrassing records is one undeniable reality: The program seems to have lost the capacity to captivate its fan base.
In short, men's basketball has lost our attention.
And it's hard to know just how much winning it would take to get it back.
Short Highs Followed by Long Plateaus
Back during the long and often draining Frank Martin years in the 2010s, many of us believed the program had finally reestablished itself in the SEC and in our hearts when the Gamecocks went on what is still one of the most unimaginable runs in the school's athletic history and sprinted to the 2017 Final Four.
That stretch literally dropped out of the heavens. There was no way to have foreseen it, because the program had been largely mired in mediocrity for most of Martin's tenure, just as it had been under Darrin Horn and Dave Odom before him.
But we watched in disappointment as almost nothing good emerged from the Cinderella run. The Gamecocks dropped right back to the middle of the league and drifted zombie-like for several more seasons before Martin was shown the door and Paris was handed the reins.
Now we seem to be sitting through a similar movie.
In Paris' second season, South Carolina nearly won the SEC outright and stormed into the NCAA Tournament – and it was such a surprising joy to see them playing late in March that we didn't even mind that they were immediately dispatched by Oregon.
Paris was named SEC Coach of the Year and signed a lengthy extension, and we once again assured ourselves that we'd found our way out of the darkness.
Then, almost inevitably, the team stumbled to a 12-20, last-in-the-SEC collapse last year before heading in the exact same direction this season. Apathy towards the program seems rampant in Gamecock Nation. I talk to other South Carolina fans constantly, and I'm just simply not hearing or participating in any conversations about the men's basketball program.
It almost feels like it no longer exists.
With the dominant rise of Dawn Staley's women's team, it seems like we've found an outlet for getting our basketball fix during the winter months while waiting for spring football practice to arrive. As long as Dawn's here, we don't even necessarily seem to need the men's team to make us remember them.
Gamecock fans are as dedicated to their teams as any in college sports, despite having little to show for their passion across the decades. It took 50 years to get us to this point, to this place of not caring.
It would take exactly this – a half a century of mediocrity and worse – to kill our resilient passion.
But right now, that passion seems like it's on life support. We've learned through decades of experience that we can survive without a winning men's basketball team. No Tournament, no problem.
Something has to change.
But after 50 never-ending years, most of us have started wondering what that something could possibly be.
Tell me what you think about the state of the men's basketball program by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com. (Please do not reply to this email.)
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