Sellers, entering year 3, opens season for Gamecocks
LaNorris Sellers starts his third season as the guy, Beamer still won't name a kicker, and Williams-Brice pauses for a fallen officer before the whistle against Kent State.
Beamer still won't name a kicker, and Sellers is done waiting
There is exactly one certainty on this depth chart, and it has been certain since spring. LaNorris Sellers opens his third season as the starter Saturday, a run across which he has thrown for 5,057 yards and 33 touchdowns for the program, per SportsTalkSC. Everything else Beamer is still sitting on, and he made no apology for it Tuesday: "It's not gamesmanship. Not trying to be secretive in regards to how we're lining up," he told reporters, adding that fans will simply "be able to tell the starters during warmups Saturday." His mood on the week itself was blunter — "Can't wait to play a game and tired of 'talking' season," he said, which is about as close as this coach gets to admitting camp has dragged.
The kicker job is the funniest case of it. GamecockFB's own account posted "Welcome home" to Houston transfer Ethan Sanchez this week, the kind of post that reads like a decision, and Beamer flatly said otherwise on Tuesday: "We are still competing." Up front, the pass rush opposite a fully rebuilt offensive line is down to two new starting edges after Dylan Stewart, dealing with a foot injury, was ruled unlikely to play Saturday, per Covers' injury table. With receivers Jayden Sellers and Jayden Gibson both out for the year, four-star freshman Sequel Patterson — an Indian Land, South Carolina product who caught 128 passes in high school — is now in the rotation alongside Nyck Harbor before he has played a single college snap.
Last season ended on a familiar sour note
South Carolina's last game was the rivalry finale, a 28-14 loss to Clemson on November 29 that closed out last season. It capped a stretch in which the Gamecocks dropped 4 of their last 5: 22-29 to Alabama, 14-30 at Ole Miss, a one-score 30-31 defeat at Texas A&M, and then Clemson again — with a 51-7 rout of Coastal Carolina as the one clean afternoon sandwiched in between.
None of that carries into 2026 — South Carolina opens at 0-0 — but it is the form the program is trying to answer for with a new season, and Clemson looms again every fall in Columbia as the measuring stick nobody in the building has forgotten.
Before kickoff, Williams-Brice pauses for a fallen officer
The South Carolina football account posted this week that Saturday's game will open with a moment of silence for Officer Chris DeLong, one line that carries more weight than anything happening on the depth chart. DeLong, a 29-year-old Columbia Police officer, was shot and killed in the line of duty on August 29 responding to a call near Garners Ferry Road, according to WIS-TV.
The Midlands have spent the week since organizing funerals and fundraisers for DeLong and a second officer wounded in the same shooting, per WIS-TV, and Saturday will be the first time Williams-Brice has filled since his death. It also happens to be High School Band Day, per South Carolina's own gameday release — a full stadium, for a somber reason, on a morning otherwise built around a Kent State cover number.
A 36.5-point number for a team still finding its edges
Kent State arrives 0-0 on the season but not unfamiliar with winning football lately, having closed last season with a 35-31 win at Northern Illinois. That is the extent of what the payload knows about the visitors, and it is enough to say this is not the shell of a program South Carolina has fattened up on in years past, even if the market disagrees: the line opened South Carolina -36.5, the widest number on this week's board, with the total set at a middling 53.5.
That kind of number is what a rebuilt offensive line and a still-unsettled kicker competition look like from Las Vegas — favored by five touchdowns and change, but breaking in pieces nobody outside Columbia has seen play a snap yet. Kickoff is this morning vs. Kent State, the same morning Williams-Brice pauses for Officer DeLong and fills for Band Day before Sellers takes his first snap of year 3.