What Shane Beamer thinks of South Carolina’s new-look non-conference football schedule
.JPG "South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer")
Over the last seven months, in the wake of the SEC and ACC both deciding to play nine conference football games, South Carolina’s future non-conference football schedule has lost most of its luster.
Home-and-home series with Miami (2026, 2027), Virginia Tech (2034, 2035), N.C. State (2030, 2031) and, most recently, North Carolina (2028-29) have all been canceled. Aside from its annual meeting with Clemson, the Gamecocks don’t have a single Power-4 opponent on their future schedule.
Instead of the Gamecocks opening the 2026 season inside Williams-Brice Stadium against the Hurricanes — a chance for two of the nation’s top quarterbacks, LaNorris Sellers and Darian Mensah, to square off — South Carolina will now face Kent State.
Talk about a letdown.
South Carolina on Friday announced a cancellation of the UNC series. In its place, for 2028 at least, USC added a home game against Bowling Green State of the Mid-American Conference.
“I think you see it, unfortunately, all across college football (with) some of those non-conference games getting canceled,” Shane Beamer told The State at SEC Meetings this week. “And I hate it. I think it would be great for the fans for us to play North Carolina.”
To be fair, Beamer warned of this outcome.
This time last year, as the SEC meetings were once again dominated by conversations about whether to stay at eight conference games or jump to nine, reporters gathered around Beamer to gauge his thoughts.
Beamer did not fully jump to one side of the fence. If the SEC chose to adopt a nine-game conference schedule, he said, that was fine ... so long as the non-conference requirements were the same for everyone.
“Next year we’ve got Miami and Clemson, so we’re already playing 10 Power 4 games,” Beamer said at the time. “If we play a ninth conference game, now we have 11.
“I would hope that everybody in our league,” he continued, “is playing the same number of Power 4 opponents as we are each year because. If not, then it is a competitive disadvantage to our program.”
Of course, that was never going to happen.
When the SEC announced last August that it was adopting a nine-game conference schedule beginning in 2026, it only required that every school play one Power-4 non-conference opponent. South Carolina checks that box annually by playing Clemson.
“If you (play) those other ones, now you’re playing 11 (Power-4 teams),” Beamer said. “And when you’ve got some conference champions that didn’t even play a Power-4 non-conference opponent last year (Texas Tech and Indiana, for example), it makes zero sense for us to be doing that.”
South Carolina 2026 football schedule
- Sept. 5 — vs. Kent State
- Sept. 12 — vs. Towson
- Sept. 19 — vs. Mississippi State
- Sept. 26 — at Alabama
- Oct. 3 — vs. Kentucky
- Oct. 10 — at Florida
- Oct. 17 — BYE
- Oct. 24 — vs. Tennessee
- Oct. 31 — at Oklahoma
- Nov. 7 — vs. Texas A&M
- Nov. 14 — at Arkansas
- Nov. 21 — vs. Georgia
- Nov. 28 — at Clemson
