Shane Beamer opens up on the highs and lows of Year 1 guiding the Gamecocks
Shane Beamer kicks back on one of the sofas positioned in the middle of his office in the Long Family Football Operations Center.
The mid-February sun shines through the windows that run the length of the room behind South Carolina’s 36th head football coach. Gamecock Park and Williams-Brice Stadium create a picturesque background beyond the glass.
The space where Beamer sits has changed plenty since this time last year. The memorabilia and framed photos that sat in stacks around the room have now been affixed to the wall. Newspaper clippings from his first press conference and the day he landed in Columbia rest on the wall to the left of his desk.
Tucked between a handful of other wall decor to the right of where Beamer sits are the original yellow pages of legal pad paper — complete with ink smudges and scratch-outs — where Beamer wrote the opening remarks for his introductory press conference in December 2020.
“I never looked at them,” he quips, glancing toward the frame as he flashes a grin.
Beamer is just over two months removed from the end of his first fall as head coach in Columbia and a 7-6 season that netted him the Steve Spurrier First-year Coach of the Year Award.
The coming weeks will bring questions on Oklahoma transfer quarterback Spencer Rattler, how the offense can develop more consistency and what South Carolina must do to climb the SEC East standings next season.
But before looking toward a 2022 season that will bring expectations and national attention, Beamer sat down with The State to put a bow on the 2021 campaign.
“Until you’re in this chair, you don’t really realize that, as the head coach, every single day when I walk in those doors down there, everybody’s taking my temperature,” Beamer said. “I don’t know if that’s the word, but I’m kind of setting the tone.”
Breaking down South Carolina’s 2022 season
Talk to enough people around Columbia and you’ll find a narrative to fit your own feelings toward Year 1 of the Beamer regime.
A handful argue that a play here or there and South Carolina could’ve won an eighth or ninth game in 2021. By that same logic, the Gamecocks were only a play or two from finishing the year 4-8 and missing a bowl game entirely.
That’s not an indictment of Beamer or his first season by any means. Rather, it’s a look at the ebbing and flowing nature this South Carolina team embodied through its first fall under the new leading man occupying the head coaches’ office on the second floor of the football operations building.
“I think if you look at our results, other than the back-to-back losses to Georgia and Kentucky, I don’t think we lost two in a row at any point,” Beamer said. “... We’ve got to be more consistent, but I think it showed that we were a resilient group and kept competing all year.”
That South Carolina won as many games as it did in 2021, frankly, ought to be cause for celebration.
Beamer inherited a program fresh off a 2-8 season and embroiled in enough turmoil to make any coach interested in the job proceed with caution. Will Muschamp was ousted in the middle of that tempestuous fall. Another 10 players departed via the transfer portal between November 2020 and January 2021. South Carolina’s quarterback room even dipped to just two scholarship players a month-and-a-half into Beamer’s tenure.
Yet, USC’s first-year staff soldiered on.
South Carolina drubbed Florida and North Carolina for statement wins. It eked out victories over East Carolina, Vanderbilt and Auburn amid a flurry of quarterback changes.
Losses to Georgia and Clemson were expected on some level. The showings in blowout losses to Tennessee and Texas A&M, though, were not.
“We were very confident going into those games (against Tennessee and Texas A&M),” Beamer said. “I believe the team was ready to play. I felt like we had a great plan. You come off the field for pregame warm-ups and you feel good about where things are in the locker room. And then we go out there and just play like we did in those games in the first quarter. Those were the (moments) where, it wasn’t difficult, it was just kind of like, ‘What the heck?’ Because I didn’t see it coming.”
Walking through the football ops building following that 44-14 throttling in College Station, Texas, Beamer bumped into senior defensive tackle Jabari Ellis.
Ellis stopped his coach by the water fountain. He had a message to deliver.
“I want you to know that we’ve got your back,” Ellis said, “and we’re going to get this thing right.”
“When Jabari — a senior that came back for his last year — said that after we just got embarrassed by Texas A&M, I’m like, ‘You know what? We’re going to be all right,’ ” Beamer recounted.
The resounding victory over Florida on Nov. 6 marked the start of a late-season surge. Like any stretch this fall, there were bumps in the road — i.e., losses at Missouri and Clemson’s 30-0 win in Columbia.
But Beamer assures his group remained steadfast.
The 38-21 rout of North Carolina in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl on Dec. 30 put the finishing touches on Year 1 and afforded onlookers nationwide proof of concept. Beamer’s postgame mayonnaise bath that set the internet ablaze was an added bonus.
“Certainly there were ups and there were downs throughout the year, but it was a group (in 2021) that, no matter what, they came to compete all the time,” Beamer said. “And that’s one of the things I was proud of. We were just talking about areas to improve in that staff meeting and one thing that you can say about us is that we never stopped competing.”
Embracing Gamecocks’ expectations for Year 2
Beamer, his wife, Emily, and youngest daughter, Olivia, took a walk around their neighborhood in recent days.
Heading down the street from their home, a car stopped, passed the trio of walkers and circled back. It was a South Carolina fan who recognized Beamer. They stopped to ask for a picture.
Beamer, as he most always does, obliged.
“I told my daughter, ‘Appreciate that, because the alternative is they’re driving by and they’re telling you that you need to get the heck out of town, or you should move and they should fire you,’ ” Beamer joked. “I certainly love it.”
The 2022 offseason and the start of spring practices next month have brought heightened expectations as to what South Carolina is and can be.
Rattler’s arrival is part of that equation. So, too, are the six other scholarship transfer portal additions the Gamecocks have brought in and a roster that returns a slew of contributors from last fall.
South Carolina was picked by media members to finish second-to-last in the SEC East a year ago. Most preseason prognosticators pegged the Gamecocks for somewhere around three or four wins.
Beamer’s squad out-performed most measurable expectations in 2021. That’s created a buzz around South Carolina football and its head coach — the kind where people stop to take pictures with you and student sections chant your name at men’s basketball games.
Dealing with those expectations, though, is a challenge in itself.
“There’s great energy and excitement about the program right now,” Beamer said. “That’s great, but seven (wins) is not the end goal. Making sure our players understand all the work that went into seven wins last season, it’s going to take all that and even more to get to that next level.”
Beamer notes he has picked the brains of friends in coaching about taking that seemingly simple-but-massive step from bowl eligibility to legitimate SEC contention. That path, in all reality, isn’t always linear. But South Carolina is in a far better spot than it was this time a year ago.
The 2021 season, as Beamer said, was a start. Really, it was as good a start as the Gamecocks could’ve hoped given the circumstances.
Beamer and his family are largely settled into their new home after spending a chunk of the season in an apartment as they awaited renovations. The walls of his office, too, are now adorned in memorabilia from his past coaching stops and his first fall in Columbia.
Another year of overachieving and Beamer may find himself hunting for more wall space.
South Carolina 2021 football scores
Home games in bold
South Carolina 2022 football schedule
Home games in bold. TV channels, times to be determined later.
- Sept. 3: home vs. Georgia State
- Sept. 10: at Arkansas
- Sept. 17: home vs. Georgia
- Sept. 24: home vs. Charlotte
- Oct. 1: home vs. S.C. State
- Oct. 8: at Kentucky
- Oct. 15: OPEN
- Oct. 22: home vs. Texas A&M
- Oct. 29: home vs. Missouri
- Nov. 5: at Vanderbilt
- Nov. 12: at Florida
- Nov. 19: home vs. Tennessee
- Nov. 26: at Clemson
This story was originally published February 17, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
