Just call him Clem: New assistant tasked with elevating South Carolina’s O-line
South Carolina’s new offensive line coach Randy Clements goes by his nickname.
Not Randy. Certainly not Mr. Clements. Just Clem.
“Everybody calls me Clem,” Clements said at his mid-December introductory press conference. “So if you say Randy, I’ll probably be looking around for somebody else.”
Clements, 59, is from Wichita Falls, Texas. He’s a coaching veteran with over 30 years of experience. The new O-line coach replaces Lonnie Teasley, who head South Carolina football coach Shane Beamer fired midseason after three years in the role.
It even took Beamer a second to realize Clements prefers his nickname. Beamer recalled a conversation with new USC offensive coordinator Kendal Briles’ agent where, for a brief moment, he thought he was battling with Clemson to hire Clements.
“He sent me a text that said, ‘We gotta schedule a zoom with Clem’ and it was in all caps, C, L, E, M,” Beamer said. “I’m like, ‘Oh, crap. Like is Clemson trying to hire him too?’ So I’m like, ‘Let’s hurry and schedule this Zoom before we move.’ And then it hit me. Wait a minute, Clem is Clements. So that gave me a little bit of a sigh of relief. He would’ve come to South Carolina anyway, even if they had Zoomed with him.”
Beamer didn’t know Clements before he came into consideration for the job. The Gamecocks’ head coach relied on former North Carolina head coach Mack Brown, who Clements worked with from 2023 to 2024, for some early insight.
The more Beamer and Brown talked, the more Beamer liked Clements.
“The feedback he gave me on Coach Clements was all I needed to hear,” Beamer said. “As I met with him and got to know him a little bit better, you realize why Coach Brown is saying the things that he said. Great leadership, great person, proven offensive line coach at the highest level. Done it in multiple conferences, done a great job of recruiting and developing players, and is really, really excited about this opportunity to be in Columbia.”
The Briles-Clements connection
The connection Clements has with Briles runs deep.
“All along, Kendal said there was one offensive line coach that he was interested in bringing,” Beamer said. “... There was one offensive line coach that he said, ‘I need to have.’ And that’s Randy Clements.”
Briles and Clements met when the former was a kid. Clements was hired by Kendal’s father, Art Briles, to coach at Stephensville High School in Texas.
“I’ve known Coach Clements since I was 12 years old,” Kendal Briles said.
“He said 12,” Clements said. “I think it was maybe more like 8 or something like that.”
When Art Briles was hired as head coach at Houston, he took Clements with him to coach the offensive line. Kendal Briles soon joined as a player. All three eventually coached together at Baylor while Art Briles was head coach there.
After Art Briles was fired from Baylor amid a sexual assault scandal involving the program, Kendal and Clements briefly went their separate ways. The two reunited for one-year stints coaching alongside each other at Houston (again), Florida State and TCU.
“I love Kendal, and of course I coached for his dad for a number of years,” Clements said. “Our families are intertwined. We’re like related. And it’s just fun to work with people that you have a connection with, and certainly this is a good example of that.”
It helps for the offensive coordinator and offensive line coach to always be on the same page, Briles said. That connection comes after years of coaching together.
“Adversity is coming, and I know how he’s going to handle it,” Briles said. “He’s a foxhole guy. He’s going to grind with the players. He’s going to continuously coach the players. He’s going to encourage the players. He’s not going to talk down to the players.
“He’s going to obviously require that they go out there and perform at a high level, and he’s going to hold them accountable to that. But when you’ve been in wars with the guy, you know how he’s going to react. And Coach Clem is one of the best I’ve been around.”
The challenge ahead
Beamer praised Clements, Briles and new running backs coach Stan Drayton for running to the opportunity at South Carolina, not from it.
That opportunity is coaching an SEC team that, at the start of 2025, seemed primed for a potential College Football Playoff run but instead ended the season with a 4-8 record.
The new coaches are tasked with turning around a Gamecock offense that was mostly abysmal. South Carolina’s offense ranked near the bottom of the SEC in most statistical categories in 2025. In Beamer’s own words, the offense, and team as a whole, “fell short of expectations.”
South Carolina’s offensive line struggled, although injuries certainly played a part in that. The Gamecocks gave up an SEC-worst 43 sacks, but that doesn’t seem to bother Clements.
“Honestly, I haven’t looked at the stats from that perspective yet,” Clements said. “I know what the job is and I know what it’s going to take. It’s just going to be something that we’re going to have to be committed to every day, and we’re going to work to get where we’re one of the most competitive programs in the best league in America.”
The offensive line group will look different in 2026. The unit will lose at least three with starting experience to the transfer portal. And it’ll add some new faces from the portal in January to go with three high school signees.
Clements wants to give everyone a shot to show they can make a difference for the Gamecocks.
“I have recruited a few of them, but as a group, it’ll be a get-to-know-each-other situation for us,” Clements said. “I want to come in with a fresh mindset, give everybody a chance to prove themselves and see where everybody fits. (Offensive line), you got five guys playing at once, but you got to have more than that, and they all got to fit together and work together. So it’ll be a grind.”
The identity Clements hopes to bring to the offensive line room is simply being effective in whatever the offense is doing — whether that’s running or throwing the football.
“Our guys, they have to play together, they have to play hard, they have to strain and they have to give us chances to get downhill and make positive yards every time we hand the ball off,” Clements said. “And then we don’t want our quarterback to have a bunch of grass stains on them at the end of the day.
“So those are things every O-lineman wants to be, but there’s a process to it, and it’s not really sexy to talk about or anything like that. It’s a daily grind, just try to constantly improve each day, little by little, and then add it up at the end.”
This story was originally published December 30, 2025 at 7:00 AM.
