The Virginia Tech job is open. Why it doesn’t make sense for Shane Beamer to leave SC
And so it begins.
Virginia Tech fired head coach Justin Fuente on Tuesday morning, leaving the door open for a new man to take over in Blacksburg.
South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer’s ties to the Hokies job are obvious. Whether he’d actually be interested in departing a gig in Columbia that he’s called his “dream job” is another question all together.
“We’re just getting started,” Beamer said at his introductory press conference. “I’ve had opportunities to be a head football coach, but I’ve been at some great places along with some great coaches and I wasn’t going to leave just to check a box to say I was a head coach.”
That Beamer would be connected to the Virginia Tech job makes sense. His father, Frank, recorded 238 of his 280 coaching wins with the Hokies. He also guided Virginia Tech to bowl eligibility in each of his final 23 years in charge of the program.
The younger Beamer played his college ball under his father as a receiver and long snapper for the Hokies between 1995 and 1999. Shane later served as an assistant on Frank’s staff from 2011 to 2015, before the latter retired from coaching.
But the connections between South Carolina’s head coach and Virginia Tech should stop there. In reality, it’d be a surprise to see him bolt for Blacksburg.
Ask those closest to the younger Beamer, and they’re quick to also note how he’s spent his 20-plus year coaching career adamant about carving his own path.
He began his time as a college coach working in the weight room under George O’Leary at Georgia Tech. That was later parlayed into a graduate assistant job at Tennessee for Phil Fulmer before he earned his first on-field job at Mississippi State on Sylvester Croom’s staff.
Stops at South Carolina, Virginia Tech, Georgia and Oklahoma followed. Each was about carving a new niche and a new path.
“I’m just thrilled for him,” Fulmer told The State earlier this year. “He’s just kind of marched along and done extremely well everywhere he’s been. He’s made the teams he was with better.”
Said Frank Beamer on Shane’s return to Virginia Tech as an assistant earlier this fall: “It was never, ‘OK, he’s the coach’s son, that’s the only reason he’s here. Everybody else said, ‘Hey, this guy’s really good and we’re excited to be working with him and having him here.’”
The understanding around Columbia is that Beamer is happy with what’s being built at South Carolina. What should be a Top 25 recruiting class in this year’s cycle certainly helps. So too does a 5-5 record that requires just one win in USC’s final two games to reach bowl eligibility for the first time since 2018.
Granted, the 2021 season hasn’t been perfect. USC had near misses against Kentucky and at Missouri. It was run off the field by Texas A&M and Georgia. The first quarter at Tennessee wasn’t exactly inspiring, either. But to lift a team that had won six games combined over the last two seasons to five victories given the rebuild job he inherited is legitimate progress.
“This is why this has been my dream job and (there’s) nowhere else that I want to be,” Beamer said after South Carolina’s dominant win over Florida two weeks ago. “This is why these coaches came here is for nights like this and we’re going to have a bunch of more nights like this going forward.”
During his introductory press conference last December, Beamer glowed with excitement. He’d worked for two decades to be afforded a chance to run his own program. Sure, he hadn’t been an offensive or defensive coordinator before, but he’d spent time at some of the nation’s biggest football factories (Georgia and Oklahoma) and was a part of Steve Spurrier’s staff ahead of the 2011 to 2013 glory days at South Carolina.
Beamer has inspired what had been a dormant program. And while this season hasn’t been perfect and there might be a higher ceiling at Virginia Tech given its spot in the Atlantic Coast Conference, it would go against almost 20 years of the younger Beamer’s intent to carve his own path.
The rumor mill, of course, doesn’t operate within the realm of common sense. For the first time since Beamer has been hired in Columbia, there’s another job open that makes sense for him, on paper, to think about.
The surface level connections make sense. Peel back the curtain some, though, and Beamer’s candidacy at Virginia Tech feels less and less likely.
“There have been some great days in Columbia, South Carolina, some great days for South Carolina football,” Beamer said at Southeastern Conference Media Days in July. “But I am 100 percent convinced that the best days of South Carolina football are right in front of us and I couldn’t more excited about that, couldn’t be more excited about being the head football coach of South Carolina.”
This story was originally published November 16, 2021 at 10:06 AM.
