SEC Media Days presents a weeklong opportunity for a unique situation as conference coaches field questions not just about their own team, but about other teams around the league and upcoming opponents for the 2026 season. During Tuesday’s showcase, Tennessee was brought up to both Georgia’s Kirby Smart and South Carolina’s Shane Beamer.
Early in the day, Smart was asked how it felt not to play longtime rival Tennessee and if it felt like a win was being taken off the schedule. Smart didn’t fall for the trap: “Yeah, you said that, not me. It’s a tough place to play and tough team to play.”
A little while later, Beamer was also asked about Tennessee. Unlike Georgia, the Gamecocks do have Tennessee on their schedule this season as the Vols return to Columbia for the first time since the 2022 defeat, which included a season-ending injury to quarterback Hendon Hooker. Beamer was asked if South Carolina had upped the fireworks budget this year after running out of the celebratory sparks during that previous game.
Beamer took a page out of Smart’s playbook with his answer: “Alright, I saw the question that Kirby got about Tennessee. Was that from you, too? Okay, and he said, ‘You said that, not me.’ You said that, not me.”
With the question being about that 2022 game, Beamer spoke on both it and the upcoming contest in Columbia this October.
“That was a great night back in 2022,” Beamer said. “There’s no doubt about it. We know it’ll be a huge challenge when they come to town this year. Another one, you know, I got asked about playing Georgia again, it’s been weird not playing Tennessee the last couple years. So it’ll be great having Tennessee back on the schedule this season, too, along with Florida. Three old SEC East opponents and rivals for South Carolina. Got a ton of respect for Coach Heupel and the way he does things. We know he’s going to have a really good team coming to town. I was so impressed watching SEC Media Day yesterday. The three players he brought, I mean, so impressed with those three guys as people with some of their comments. No, that’ll be a big one when we get to that one. Hopefully we can have the offensive output that we had the last time they were in town.”
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Tennessee Football holds a 27-11-2 all-time record against South Carolina as old SEC East foes, as Beamer mentioned in his answer. And while the Vols did get revenge in 2023 with a 41-20 win over Beamer’s Gamecocks in Knoxville in 2023, the 2022 game that stopped Tennessee from having a spot in the College Football Playoffs still leaves a sour taste in the mouths of Vol fans across the state.
South Carolina blew out Tennessee by a score of 63-38 as quarterback Hendon Hooker suffered a career-altering ACL tear in the penultimate week of the regular season.
While the 2022 game featured a 7 p.m. start time, this year’s contest won’t be under the lights nearly as long. It’s not a Noon game, but it does have the Flex window time slot. That means the game on Oct. 24 will start between 3:30 and 4:30 p.m. ET, with the exact time to be revealed at a later date.
Tennessee will play Furman, Kennesaw State, Georgia Tech, Texas, Auburn, Arkansas, and Alabama before the trip to Columbus. South Carolina, meanwhile, will play Kent State, Towson, Mississippi State, Alabama, Kentucky, and Florida before hosting the Vols. The Gamecocks, though, will have a bye week before the meeting in Williams-Brice Stadium. Definitely something to note.
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