Scott Davis: Sweet relief after Virginia Tech victory

Scott Davis has followed South Carolina athletics for over 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly newsletter year-round (sign up here) and a column during football season that’s published each Monday on GamecockCentral.com.

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When the clock finally hit triple zeros, I felt just like Shane Beamer felt.

Well, that’s not true.

I will never know exactly what Beamer felt.

Indeed, none of us – even the most empathetic among us – knows exactly what it must have felt like for the fifth-year Gamecock head coach to walk towards midfield having just defeated the program he grew up in and that his father brought to glorious life.

Only Shane Beamer himself knows what all of the emotions were that swirled and twisted and churned through his chest and his heart and his head after his Gamecocks finally wore down the pesky Hokies by a workmanlike 24-11 score in Atlanta to kick off the 2025 season.

But we probably do have an idea what at least one of those emotions was.

Relief.

Sweet, sweet relief.

Back when August camp began, Beamer himself hinted that he’d be feeling just such a thing if he could survive Week One. “I’ll be glad when it’s over,” he said then about his team’s season opener.

Now that it is over, and now that the Gamecocks are safely 1-0 after a hard-fought four quarters at Mercedes-Benz, it’s becoming more and more clear just how much this football game meant to South Carolina’s coach. And why wouldn’t it?

He grew up in Blacksburg. He played for the Hokies. He coached Virginia Tech alongside his legendary father, one of the true “good guys” of college football. And after his Dad stepped away after a nearly 30-year Hall of Fame career at VT, Shane watched as Frank Beamer was immortalized with a statue outside Lane Stadium.

That’s a lot to confront during four quarters of a college football game.

If anything, it’s remarkable Beamer was able to keep his emotions in check as well as he did leading into a game that was just as important for his players and his program as it was for him. Because if it had been me, and I’d been facing even a sliver of the situation that I just described above, I’d have been a basket case for the last nine months while I contemplated how to get through it all.

He did indeed get through it. We all got through it together.

And no, maybe the Gamecocks didn’t deliver a crisp, finely tuned domination of a Hokies team that went 6-7 last year and made wholesale changes to its coaching staff during the off-season. And sure, some of the same ups and downs and challenges and question marks that have nagged this team for years reemerged in Game One.  

So if you’re a Gamecock fan like me, and your primary emotion following the game was sweet, sweet relief, well…you’re not alone. And you have nothing to be ashamed about.

Relief is not a negative emotion.

Relief means that no matter what you went through, it all worked out in the end.

Truth be told, Beamer talked up the Virginia Tech program so successfully leading into this football game that I was more nervous than I could ever remember being for a contest in which South Carolina was a more-than-a-touchdown favorite.

As August wore on, I found myself fretting the details as much as I would have it the Gamecocks had been playing the SEC Championship Game. The Hokies came to Atlanta with a speedy, athletic quarterback – haven’t South Carolina teams been tormented by mobile QBs since the 1930s or so? And all these new coordinators Virginia Tech was bringing in…how in the world were we going to scheme for all this stuff? And what about all these new transfers they added in Blacksburg over the winter – were these guys better players than the ones who suited up in orange and maroon last year?

As it happened, all of those things wound up challenging a South Carolina roster that was itself breaking in new players on both sides of the ball.

Virginia Tech played a bruising, physical style of football that would have been a tough matchup for just about anyone in a season opener (and if you watched the game on ESPN like I did, then you heard analyst Louis Riddick praising the Hokies’ toughness so often I started wondering if he was wearing a Michael Vick throwback jersey in the booth).

The Gamecocks dropped some passes, committed some penalties, whiffed on some blocks and fell victim to some of the same officiating weirdness that we’re starting to expect around these parts.

And yet despite it all, they won a showcase neutral-site game against a quality ACC opponent. They did it in a season opener, which is a crapshoot for just about every team from here to Hawaii. They covered the spread. And they offered tantalizing glimpses of just how special things can be in 2025 if they’re able to iron out some mistakes and put a complete game together.

How do you spell relief?

24-11, South Carolina, in Atlanta, Georgia.

Take a deep breath and smile, friends. There are at least 11 more of these to go. And right now, we’re undefeated.

The Lee Corso Game Balls of the Week

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If you’d told me 20 years ago that I’d not only be giving Lee Corso a Game Ball, but naming the weekly Balls after him, I’d have punched you in the face, then punched myself in the face for good measure. At that time, Corso was Public Enemy No. 1 in the Palmetto State for wondering aloud on a broadcast why Steve Spurrier would want to go coach at “that place.” But time has its way of softening all the edges and healing all the wounds. We’d be remiss if we didn’t throw our first Ball to…

Lee Corso – I wasn’t quite prepared for how emotional I ended up feeling as I watched the tributes pour in for Corso during his final College GameDay broadcast ever on Saturday. Corso suffered a stroke several years back but has continued on GameDay, showing up every fall without fail, donning mascot heads and mixing it up onstage outside college stadiums.

Watching the clips from his three-plus decades on the show, it became apparent to me just how central he’s been to my life as a sports fan – he became intertwined with my memories at some point. Kirk Herbstreit gave him a powerful compliment when he talked about Corso’s genuine human qualities. “He listens,” Herbstreit said of his friend and mentor. So should we all.

Shane Beamer – Facing a colossal tidal wave of emotions, South Carolina’s head coach somehow found a way to block out the personal ties and get his team over the hump in an absolutely critical opening game to a season that Gamecock fans have hungered for since January.

My Parents – On a day when South Carolina played a football game in Atlanta, I drove from my home in the Atlanta area back to South Carolina. Why? To watch the game with my parents. My wife was out of town for a long-planned girls’ weekend as gameday arrived, so rather than watch the game alone and feel sorry for myself, I headed to my home state and sat with my parents in front of a flat-screen television with the volume cranked to approximately 600 decibels.

The three of us spent all four quarters in a state of profound agony – there couldn’t have been three more nervous human beings in the same room anywhere in America. At one point, all three of us were pacing around the den in different spots. But on a day when Shane Beamer celebrated a win over Virginia Tech with his proud father, it was a memorable moment to share the victory with my Mom and Dad. And as loud as it got in Mercedes-Benz, it was downright riotous in my parents’ den when LaNorris Sellers connected with Nyck Harbor for a touchdown bomb. Speaking of which…

LaNorris Sellers: Still Superman – Have we ever seen a Gamecock football player make the kinds of plays he’s making right now? When he turns those certain sacks into unimaginable first downs for the South Carolina offense, you can’t even measure how devastating it is to the spirit of the opposing team.

I’ve spent a lifetime watching these kinds of extraordinary athletes torment South Carolina, so it’s almost hard to wrap my mind around the sight of someone in a Gamecock uniform sticking a knife into an opponent and ripping their souls out the way he does.

Of all his breathtaking moments during the game, my favorite was probably his run to secure a first down late in the fourth quarter and all but seal the victory. If you watch the replay, there’s simply no way that sequence should have ever resulted in positive yards for the Gamecocks, much less sealed the win. We won’t see anything quite like this ever again.

Dylan Stewart – Seven tackles and a sack for South Carolina’s all-everything edge rusher, who absolutely played like the best defensive player on the field for either squad. While we’re here, exactly how nauseous were you feeling when Stewart was briefly lying on the turf with a shoulder injury? You want to talk about sweet relief? Whew.

Beamer Ballllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll! – Shane Beamer’s a pretty animated and excitable coach on the sidelines, which is one of the many reasons why Gamecock fans have connected with him on a personal level. But I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him more jacked than he was after Vicari Swain delivered a twisting, turning punt return 80 yards to the house to give South Carolina some much-needed breathing room in a stagnant game where the momentum seemed to be creeping towards Virginia Tech. That electric moment happened after Beamer insisted on making the Hokies punt the ball again after a penalty – exactly the kind of special teams jolt from the heavens that his father’s Tech teams turned into a brand name.

Neutral Site? – Shout-out to a raucous Gamecock Nation for turning the Benz into Williams-Brice ATL. I knew we’d have the edge in fan support for this game, but this thing ended up being a home game for South Carolina. Both the team and the fans represented themselves well enough in a national showcase game to put the program in line for invites to future events.

The “Opening Game Jitters Are the Worst Kind of Jitters” Deflated Balls of the Week

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Why beat around the bush when we can get right to it?

Season Opener Uncertainties – Do you ever feel truly satisfied with what you see from your favorite college football team during a season opener? Everything seems a little woozy and fuzzy out there, almost like those moments when you’ve just woken up from an afternoon nap and can’t quite see straight for a few minutes. And it’s always hard to know just how terrified we should be about some of the issues we’ve noticed out there, or if we should just chalk it up to the vagaries of Week One. Speaking of issues…

Are We Really Going to Spend Another Season Talking About the Offensive Line? Again? – Sellers ran for his life for most of four quarters. The Gamecock running backs had precious little room in which to roam. The line all but collapsed in giving up a safety. And the Hokie defense compiled four sacks and spent much of the day living in the South Carolina backfield.

At this point, fretting about the O-line is starting to seem like a chronic condition for South Carolina fans, something that has afflicted the fan base for decades across an untold number of coaching regimes and rosters. It’s difficult to imagine any team making a College Football Playoff run with substandard offensive line play, so for now, we can only hope this is just one of those weird Week One developments.

“After Further Review…” – I never thought I’d say this, but I’m starting to wonder if having instant replay has actually improved football or just made it stranger. You can no longer trust the instincts of the announcing team – it’s clear no one ever really knows what an officiating crew is going to decide when they go under the hood to examine a replay.

After Nyck Harbor caught a pass in the end zone from Sellers, put both feet down in bounds and never actually dropped the football to the ground at any point, the crew somehow found a way to rule that it wasn’t a catch after watching enough angles of the play through replay, leading to a round of “I simply don’t know what a catch is anymore” chatter from the ESPN team.

The same weirdness almost capsized the LSU-Clemson game, where a touchdown was also taken off the board from the Bayou Bengals in a sequence that left them scoring no points at all on the drive. Yes, I want to get obviously erroneous calls fixed. But beyond that, these crews have started spending so much time agonizing over 15 different replay angles for so long that ultimately any outcome starts to seem possible.

In the end, that wiped-off touchdown didn’t make the difference.

Instead, the grit, determination and will of Shane Beamer’s team did.

They could have lost this game.

Many Gamecock teams from years past would’ve done so.

This team did not.

And the warm smile that spread across Shane Beamer’s face when it was all over told the story better than the stat sheet did.

Sweet relief indeed.

Tell me how you felt after Game One by writing me at [email protected].

DISCUSSION: See what other Gamecock fans are saying about the Virginia Tech game on The Insiders Forum!