The Coach Who Beat Savannah State 87–0 Played for Savannah State
A Division II program opened its season against the defending HBCU national champion. The result was scheduled a year in advance.
Chennis Berry was an All-SIAC offensive tackle at Savannah State in 1994. On August 29 he stood on the other sideline in Orangeburg while his South Carolina State team scored more points against his alma mater than any Bulldogs squad has scored against anyone in the program's history.
Eighty-seven. The previous school record was 82, set in 1981 against Johnson C. Smith under Bill Davis. It stood forty-five years.
Across the field, Savannah State's first-year head coach Thomas Howard was working his first game in the job — at the school where he spent the 2019–20 season as defensive coordinator and linebackers coach.
Two men, each standing opposite a place that made them.
What the scoreboard was always going to say
Savannah State plays in the SIAC. It is a Division II program.
South Carolina State plays in the MEAC, at the FCS level. It won the HBCU national championship last season and entered this one ranked 24th in FCS.
Those are different divisions of college football with different scholarship limits, different rosters, and different budgets. When a Division II team opens on the road against a defending national champion one level up, the outcome is not a competitive question. It is a line item.
The scoreboard read 21–0 after one quarter and 52–0 at halftime, in front of a crowd of 12,000 at Oliver C. Dawson Stadium on Willie E. Jeffries Field.
The numbers, for the record
South Carolina State finished with 627 yards of total offense, 423 of them on the ground, with seven rushing touchdowns on 46 carries. The Bulldogs won the first-down count 32 to 6, converted 8 of 10 third downs, and scored on all eleven trips inside the red zone.
Keely Watson completed 8 of 12 passes for 95 yards and three touchdowns — to Malaqhi Jones from 23 yards, Mason Pickett-Hicks from 9, and Tyler Smith. Josh Shaw ran for three scores, from 5, 4 and 10 yards, on nine carries for 74 yards. Pickett-Hicks added 95 rushing yards on nine carries and Ricorian Brown 75 on seven.
Savannah State finished with 117 yards — 75 rushing, 42 passing — and six first downs. The Tigers converted 3 of 15 third downs, failed on both fourth-down attempts, and did not reach the red zone. Christian Burks completed 5 of 14 for 34 yards with an interception. South Carolina State forced three fumbles, recovered two, and intercepted a pass.
Where Savannah State's season actually starts
On September 12, at 6 p.m., at Theodore A. Wright Stadium in Savannah, the Tigers open at home against Albany State in the SIAC.
That is the game that counts toward anything Savannah State can win. Albany State went 8–0 in the conference and 12–2 overall last season and opens 0–1 this one. The SIAC title, and everything a Savannah State season can actually be, runs through games like that one — not through an August trip to Orangeburg.
The Tigers have a bye first.
The thing worth saying plainly
There is a version of this story that treats a Division II team's score against an FCS champion as a punchline. That version tells a reader nothing.
The useful facts are these: two coaches met a program that shaped them, on opposite sidelines. A forty-five-year-old school record fell. And a Georgia program with a first-year head coach played the one game on its schedule that was never going to tell anyone anything about it, and now goes home to play the ones that will.
Statistics from the South Carolina State and Savannah State athletics releases and the Associated Press box score. Crowd figure and coaching biographical details from the SIAC and Savannah State releases.