How Beamer plans to navigate ‘chaotic’ few weeks finishing Oklahoma job, starting USC
Any time a Power 5 college football program gets a new head coach, the new guy in charge is quickly thrust into a frenzy of activity — hiring a new staff, talking to current players, recruiting new ones, meeting important figures, usually moving a family.
But even by the usual standards, South Carolina’s Shane Beamer is in for a jam-packed few weeks.
He has a couple games, including a Big 12 championship game, left to coach at his old job at Oklahoma. He has to round out his staff, including two coordinator hires. He has to salvage what’s left of a 2021 recruiting class ranked outside the top 80 nationally. He has to ensure there’s not a mass exodus from the Gamecocks’ roster. And he has to do it all while dealing with COVID-19 restrictions that will often restrict, or greatly limit, in-person interactions.
“Chaotic,” Beamer said Monday when asked how his life will look in the immediate future. “I haven’t slept much since this was finalized, which is a good problem. And there’s a lot to get done. But (athletic director Ray Tanner) was telling me earlier this morning an old Jim Valvano theory that you have three eight-hour shifts in a day. And that’s how we’re going to attack this thing.”
That starts with a return to Oklahoma on Monday evening. The Sooners play West Virginia on Saturday, followed by Iowa State in the Big 12 title game on Dec. 19. When news broke Sunday that Beamer planned on returning to OU for those games instead of immediately staying in Columbia, there was surprise and a little concern among some fans. But on Monday, Beamer explained why he felt that he had to go back, even if it means working two jobs for a while.
“I have deep relationships with those players at Oklahoma, and I want to be loyal to those guys as well. And I don’t want to sweep the rug out from under them and leave them high and dry with two weeks left in our regular season with another opportunity to win a Big 12 championship. I didn’t think that was the right thing to do,” Beamer said. “I talked to the players on our [USC] team yesterday about trust, about communication, about loyalty, and I didn’t think it was fair to me to have that conversation with those guys, and then leave these guys high and dry out in Oklahoma.”
It helps Beamer that because of COVID-19, the NCAA has imposed a recruiting dead period — even if he stayed in South Carolina, he couldn’t meet any recruits in-person. On the other hand, he’ll have less than two weeks before the early signing period begins Dec. 16.
“If this was a contact period ... it certainly would change things, because I would be in living rooms tonight, without a doubt, and living rooms yesterday, and so on and so forth,” Beamer said.
Instead, Beamer said he and Oklahoma coach Lincoln Riley have had discussions, and he plans to do most of his South Carolina work — likely entailing a lot of time on the phone or in video calls — in the afternoons and evenings.
Beamer also noted that many of the current players on South Carolina’s rosters have gone home or will do so in the near future with the regular season over and final exams wrapping up, further reducing the need for him to be physically present in South Carolina right away.
“It’s not like the team’s in the building and I’ll miss out on an opportunity to visit those guys. I’m talking to them on the phone, I met with them all yesterday. And I’m not just going to go back to Oklahoma and not talk to them again for a couple of weeks. I’m going to communicate with these guys throughout and be consistent about that.”
The gap between the end of Oklahoma’s schedule and South Carolina’s is larger than normal because of the coronavirus pandemic. And that could also have some effect on Beamer’s timeline for hiring his staff, as some of the coaches and coordinators he’s likely to pursue won’t finish their season for another two weeks either.
In acknowledging that, he added that he wanted to fill out his staff as quickly as possible but also wouldn’t “rush” the process either. And there’s a large pool of candidates to consider.
“I’ve coached with over 100 different full-time coaches in my career at seven different Power 5 schools. That’s not counting graduate assistants and analysts,” Beamer said. “The amount of people, the attention that I’ve gotten from people that are interested in coaching here — I’ve gotten calls from four head coaches in the NFL in the last three days, not wanting to coach themselves, but recommending people that they felt strongly about.”
So all in all, the next two weeks are likely to be especially overwhelming for Beamer. But what about a bowl game for Oklahoma? The Sooners are currently projected by some to make a New Year’s Six game.
“Yeah, we haven’t talked about that far,” Beamer said. “My conversations with coach Riley and coach Tanner were, let’s get through this week ... and the championship game next Saturday, let’s get through these next two weeks and then we’ll see where we are.”
This story was originally published December 8, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
