Tonka Hemingway believes Georgia should always be on South Carolina's schedule

With Texas and Oklahoma entering the SEC, the future of scheduling in the conference has been widely debated. In particular, it’s been debated about which games need to happen annually. For South Carolina Gamecocks defensive lineman Tonka Hemingway, it’s obvious that Georgia should always be on South Carolina’s schedule.

At SEC media days, Hemingway laid out why he thinks that South Carolina and Georgia should be an annual conference game.

“Conference game? I definitely probably say that Georgia game,” Tonka Hemingway said. “I feel like even the fans love that game. It’s always a good turnout. Not that far from South Carolina, so…”

For the 2024 season, at least, the SEC is only going to play eight conference games. That limits the amount of rivals that the conference is going to be able to protect in that season. In that 2024 season, South Carolina won’t be playing Georgia. For the Bulldogs, rivalries with teams like Auburn and Florida took precedence.

If he chooses to, Tonka Hemingway could return for the 2024 season, due to the Covid season. However, he won’t be able to play the team he sees as South Carolina’s main SEC rival that season if he does so.

SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey explained that there was a lot of debate about what number of conference games to play in 2024 and argued that fans will continue to get everything they love out of the SEC in the 2024 schedule.

“During this time of change, our fans will continue to enjoy traditional rivalries and begin to see new matchups presented by the addition of two historically successful football programs to the SEC,” Sankey said.

Tonka Hemingway on the best SEC environments

Despite how important the rivalry game with Georgia is to Tonka Hemingway, he doesn’t think that the Bulldogs have one of the SEC’s best environments. Instead, he named two different schools.

“I probably say like one of the loudest, Texas A&M. Texas A&M a good one. Tennessee can get pretty loud, too, as well. So between them two,” Hemingway said.

Playing Texas A&M has been important to Tonka Hemingway. In particular, when the Aggies came to Columbia last season, and the Gamecocks managed to get a win.

“That was a great moment. Starting it off like that, I’ve never been a part of a game where we started off like that. That was a great note, great way to start. We just got to keep building on that.”