ATHENS, Ga. — South Carolina once had a quarterback named Buddy Bennett, who hitchhiked his way to Columbia and became the starter. That story of simple desire was cited decades later by his grandson, Stetson, before he won a national championship for Georgia.
Seven years ago, South Carolina officials were in Kirby Smart’s kitchen, talking to him and his family about becoming their head coach. Then word came down that Georgia also was making a coaching change, and that was that.
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Shane Beamer was on Smart’s first staff at Georgia. Now he’s the South Carolina head coach. He replaced Will Muschamp, who’s on Georgia’s staff, as are two other recent Gamecocks assistant coaches.
We could go on. The ties between the two programs are, to understate it, extensive. They share a border and a football-first culture and were near-annual rivals even before they shared a league.
But they don’t share the same tier in college football. One is the dominant program in its talent-rich state, the other shares a smaller state with a recent national champion. There’s a reason No. 1 Georgia is a 24-point favorite as it goes to Columbia this week.
There’s also a reason Gamecocks fans, who have been through a lot, still have hope, if not for Saturday but for someday.
South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer, left, was an assistant coach on Kirby Smart’s first staff at Georgia. (Joshua L. Jones / Athens Banner-Herald via USA Today)“Obviously, you can look at the fact they’re national champions and you’re Belk Bowl champions, and intellectually you understand there’s a difference. They’re not stupid,” said Heath Cline, who has hosted a sports radio show on Columbia’s 107.5 The Game FM for more than a decade. “But there’s just enough history there that I just think they feel like it’s not that big a gap. That there are ways they think that gap will get bridged.”
Gamecocks fans old enough to legally drink alcohol have seen their team beat Georgia eight times, including three years ago. They’ve seen Steve Spurrier coach their team and needle the Bulldogs publicly and back it up on the field. They also have seen the limitations of having a Hall of Fame coach, with Spurrier hitting his ceiling in Columbia and retiring, and the Gamecocks struggling to get back while Smart and Buddy Bennett’s grandson hoisted the national championship trophy.
Still, South Carolina is a program that almost always has tried to get into that higher echelon. It has a stadium that can seat as many as 85,199. (A record set for the 2012 game against, guess who, Georgia.) It doesn’t have ready access to as many recruits, but it has built facilities to try to attract them. There were plenty of reasons that Smart, who had waited for the right opportunity before leaving his assistant coaching job at Alabama, was thinking hard about South Carolina back in 2015.
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“They have a tremendous following,” Smart said Tuesday, “mainly fit the SEC culture in terms of, you know, their fan base and their commitment to facilities and winning and environment. They have all those things.
“That’s not a huge state, so they know they have to go outside of the state to win battles. They come into Georgia a lot. They’ve gone to Tennessee a lot. They’re closer to the Eastern seaboard, some of the D.C. area, and they’ve got some really good players from that area because they’re the closest SEC school by car to get there. So Shane’s done a good job there, and they’ll probably continue to do a good job because they recruit well.”
Georgia dominates the all-time record at 53-19 with two ties, and has won six of the past seven meetings. Even when South Carolina was doing well, Georgia found a way to spoil things, most notably in 1980: George Rogers was on the way to winning the Heisman Trophy, but the Bulldogs held him in check, winning 13-10 on their way to the national championship.
In 2002, the Lou Holtz-coached Gamecocks were coming off a 9-3 season, with hopes of even better. But then David Pollack’s end-zone interception punctuated a 13-7 win in Columbia. Two years later, the Gamecocks had a 16-0 halftime lead before the Bulldogs scored 20 unanswered points to get the win.
It took Spurrier to turn the momentum. The Head Ball Coach, much to his personal delight, dominated the Dawgs when he was Florida’s coach and took some of that mojo with him to Columbia. Though he lost four of his first five games against Georgia, he won four of his next five.
Spurrier started taking shots after his second win over Georgia, a 17-6 slog in 2010, during which the Gamecocks dominated time of possession with Marcus Lattimore racking up 182 yards on 37 carries, on essentially the same play.
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“That little inside play (we ran), the NFL doesn’t run that play,” Spurrier said, going after Georgia defensive coordinator Todd Grantham.
“I guess he was just mad because of his lack of success in the NFL,” Grantham shot back, albeit with a grin.
Spurrier kept winning, and it gave the Gamecocks’ fan base much-needed confidence and much-deserved swagger. Armed with a great run of mostly in-state recruits (Lattimore, Stephon Gilmore, Jadeveon Clowney, Alshon Jeffery) the Gamecocks threatened the Bulldogs for SEC East supremacy.
Spurrier also kept after Georgia. Before the 2012 season, he complained about the game being moved back to October because “early in the season Georgia usually has some of their best players suspended.” Georgia’s coach and athletic director both laughed it off, knowing Spurrier was right, and then that October, in a highly anticipated matchup of highly ranked teams, the stands and press box in Columbia literally shook, and South Carolina ran away with a 35-7 win.
But the run hit an end during the 2015 season. Spurrier resigned two weeks after losing to Georgia, and Mark Richt was fired after the regular season ended. And that’s when the two programs diverged.
“Georgia has been very good but maybe not as great as their fans think they should be,” Spurrier said in the spring of 2016. “Eight, nine wins a year. But they want 11, 12 wins a year. It’s one of those jobs where the expectations are higher than at most schools.”
Georgia reached those expectations by hiring one of its own in Smart. South Carolina still hasn’t gotten back to Spurrier levels but is trying to do it by hiring someone who knows the terrain: Beamer was an assistant there under Spurrier and understands what he’s up against in resources and tradition, but he also knows how he can use the advantages. He’s trying to win at South Carolina not by being the big name, a la Spurrier or Holtz, but being the right fit, a la Sam Pittman at Arkansas. (Another former Smart assistant.)
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“Certainly overall fit from a culture standpoint and understanding the place, there’s no question about it, I was very comfortable here within the program, and outside the facility, as well,” Beamer said. “Knowing this community and the people, as well, and knowing what South Carolina fans are about and what they expect, and what this state is about.”
The state is key and where South Carolina’s chief rival resides: Clemson has taken a step up the past decade, winning two national championships and emerging as a perennial College Football Playoff contender. The naysayers argue Clemson has a much easier road in the ACC and may have a point, but the head-to-head results are also stark: Clemson has won seven straight, tying the previous longest streak in the rivalry’s history, and leads the series 72–42–4.
Clemson is still front of mind for Gamecocks fans, in the way that Georgia Tech is not for Bulldogs fans.
“If you told them you can beat Clemson twice in the next five years but the price of that is you will lose the next seven to Georgia … and put that to a vote of Gamecock fans, they would take it in a second,” Cline said. “They want to beat Georgia. But especially because of what’s happened the last few years, they are desperate to end this run by Clemson.”
There’s a slight chance Georgia and South Carolina may not continue as an annual rivalry: If the SEC keeps an eight-game format with one permanent opponent, then Georgia would play Florida every year, while South Carolina’s permanent opponent would be unclear. That’s one reason South Carolina would seem to want the nine-game format with three permanent opponents, the scenario most likely to win out. South Carolina wasn’t in the SEC until 1992, but prior to that, the two programs played on a near-annual basis: every year between 1966 and 1989 and every year from 1958 to 1964.
Before Saturday’s game, the 74th in the rivalry’s history, there will be plenty of reunions: Muschamp with the players he recruited, Beamer with his old boss Smart and other friends, and plenty of players recruited by both staffs. One of them will be Oscar Delp, who a year ago was one of the main targets for South Carolina, someone Beamer all but lobbied for publicly, advertising how much a tight end would be featured in the Gamecocks’ offense. There was also a social media push by the fan base to get Delp to go to Columbia.
Delp opted for Georgia anyway, despite a much more crowded tight end room in Athens.
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“That kind of thing kind of sums it up,” Cline said. “You have this effort to catch them, and even on someone who’s a third-string tight end this year, Georgia can kind of take what they want.”
(Top photo from 2021 of South Carolina running back ZaQuandre White and Georgia defensive back Latavious Brini: Dale Zanine / USA Today)
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