What Thomas Brown remembers about his first time playing in Williams-Brice

Thomas Brown didn’t even get a carry in that game, but he remembers some things well from his first trip to Williams-Brice Stadium.

South Carolina’s new running backs coach was only a freshman for the Georgia Bulldogs. He’d go on to lead his team with 875 yards, but that day, he was behind Danny Ware, Michael Cooper and Tyson Browning.

But even without touching the ball, he got a sense for what that stadium, the atmosphere he’ll soon enough coach in, could bring.

“They were always tough,” Brown said of the matchup. “It was my freshman year, might have been a blackout game. I remember how loud it was and how crazy it was. Danny went out in the first quarter, he got hit pretty hard, punctured a lung or something.”

He’s got a mostly good memory. It was in fact a blackout game. According to the Associated Press report from the time, the injury was considered a “bruised chest” when it happened in the second quarter.

“Ware was ready to go back into the game after X-rays were negative but he began coughing up blood,” according to that story.

Brown remembered a UGA loss, but his team actually rallied from down 16-0 for a 20-16 win to start off a 10-2 season. The Gamecocks were setting off on Lou Holtz’s last season, the one that ended with a brawl and turning down a bowl game.

His second trip to Columbia, as a junior, saw him lead his team with 69 yards and 16 carries, as the Bulldogs ground out a 18-0 win against a Carolina team that went on to win eight games.

Brown went 3-1 against South Carolina.

He put up 144 yards and a score in a two-point win in Athens as a sophomore, the first SEC win for an eventual conference champion. His final game against USC saw him cede the top spot to Knowshon Moreno (Brown still ran for 779 yards that season), and saw the Gamecocks pull out a 16-12 win.

That ended a five-game Bulldogs winning streak and helped push the Gamecocks to a 6-1 start, from which they slipped to a 6-6 finish. The loss ended up costing the Bulldogs an SEC East title and a shot at eventual national champion LSU (Georgia finished that season No, 2 in the country).

Brown will have to wait until 2020 to coach the Gamecocks against the Bulldogs in Columbia. He will get to return to Athens with his current team, facing his alma mater in a stadium he’s got a lot of history in.

And he knows what a feisty, hard-hitting Gamecocks team can do in the rivalry

“It was a tough matchup,” Brown said.