How South Carolina is learning to manage Year 1 successes, expectations under Beamer
Shane Beamer stands at the front of the defensive meeting room at the Long Family Football Operations Center and nods.
He’s looking up into the fourth row, spinning his mental wheels for a response when asked how South Carolina can better handle successes week to week after overachieving in Year 1 of his regime.
“Great question,” Beamer said. “Yeah, we do have to handle success better.”
Taking over a team and program that had combined for just six wins over Will Muschamp’s final two seasons as head coach, the Gamecocks hadn’t sniffed much, if any, tangible on-field success in almost three calendar years by the time the 2021 campaign kicked off.
Upsets over Florida, Auburn and North Carolina provided the highs in Beamer’s first season. Those were sandwiched in between blowouts at Tennessee, Georgia and Texas A&M.
Now heading into a spring that will bring expectations of a bowl game and beyond, Beamer and his staff are working to help their squad manage those thoughts of grander success, while also remaining focused on the task at hand.
“I know everybody talks about the process and only worrying about today, but it’s true,” Beamer continued. “Like, how good a day can we have today and just keep stacking good days.”
That South Carolina has received ample offseason hype is deserved. Winning six games, let alone a seventh felt like a pipe dream heading into Beamer’s first fall as head coach in Columbia.
USC was picked to finish behind every team in its division except Vanderbilt — which had won just a single SEC game in its last 17 tries.
Four different quarterbacks, an opportunistic defense and a dash of belief flipped that perceived preseason script. South Carolina survived against Vanderbilt, East Carolina and Troy. It throttled Eastern Illinois. It also added those aforementioned upsets of Florida, Auburn and North Carolina.
Yet the consistency needed to compete at the highest levels of the league lagged. Beamer told The State over the offseason his squad’s showing in a 44-13 loss at Texas A&M that wasn’t as close as the score might indicate surprised him. Falling behind 28-0 in the first quarter of an eventual rout at Tennessee didn’t help the cause either.
All-American safety Jaylan Foster conceded there were times the Gamecocks simply didn’t know how to handle a big win. That carried over into the following week and provided a glimpse into why the season ebbed and flowed as it did.
“That was the hardest part, I think, about this season for us — experiencing those wins — because we were winning and we all didn’t know how to react,” Foster told The State. “The next week we were feeling ourselves just because we hadn’t felt it in so long. And that was the hard part because we would win a big game and then come back next week, start the week off slow, have a couple bad practices.”
South Carolina was able to mitigate that inexperience, earning a bowl eligibility-clinching win over Auburn before running over North Carolina in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl on Dec. 30.
Now comes taking a step toward competing consistently.
South Carolina special teams coordinator Pete Lembo has as much perspective on the subject as anyone on the Gamecocks’ staff.
Ball State had won six games combined in the two years prior to his hiring as head coach in 2011. Lembo went on to seasons of 6-6, 9-4 and 10-3 over the next three years.
“We got to average (in 2021), but now going from average to very good or good, or whatever your spectrum is for that, that’s a lot of heavy lifting,” he explained on Wednesday. “You can’t just do what you did last year. You have to ratchet up what the expectations are. You have to ratchet up what the commitment is.
“It’s not good enough anymore to just say, ‘I love football, and I’m going to go out there and practice hard.’ That was OK to get to a six-win regular season and win a bowl game. Now it’s, I have to love football. I have to practice very hard, but I have to practice with a lot of detail. I have to find little creative ways to make my game 10 or 15% better.”
USC is still almost six months out from its first game of 2022 against Georgia State. The import of former Oklahoma quarterback Spencer Rattler, among a handful of impact transfers, has folks buzzing about South Carolina football this spring.
Beamer joked on Tuesday he’s had people tell him the Gamecocks could be ranked in the preseason polls. He reminds them there are “about eight opponents” on this year’s schedule that may be slotted ahead of South Carolina.
The Gamecocks and their effervescent head coach made plenty of noise in 2021. They’re working toward an even more boisterous encore with an eye on reaching or surpassing expectations once more.
