Beamer mum on potential staff changes, apologizes to fans

In a college football world where assistant coaching changes have been made sooner and sooner into the season and offseason, Shane Beamer said the Gamecocks will wait until the end of the season to decide any of that.

After South Carolina’s 30-0 loss to Clemson Saturday night Beamer said the Gamecocks are going to evaluate the team “after the season” and didn’t address any potential staff changes postgame.

“I mean just walked off the field. We’ll evaluate the football team after the season. We won a game last week and were ready to anoint people coach of the year. We had a bad night,” Beamer said. “Like we do at the end of every season I’ll sit down with coach (Ray) Tanner and Chance Miller and look what at what the best thing for our program is moving forward.”

The Gamecocks finished their regular season Saturday night with the loss to Clemson, the seventh-straight in the series, to end 6-6 with a bowl trip on the horizon at some point in December.

Coaching changes on every staff seemingly happen annually, a factor of being in this business, but Beamer didn’t want to discuss any of that after the game. Instead, he offered a peak into what his schedule looks like over the next few days as he wraps the regular season.

“The thing I’m excited about doing is getting on the road recruiting tomorrow,” he said, “meeting with the team and learning from this one like we always do then getting on the road and continue to find and recruit great players here.”

Beamer and the Gamecocks (6-6, 3-5 SEC) had another anemic performance where South Carolina averaged 3.3 yards per play with the longest run a 12-yard scamper from Zeb Noland on the final play of the game.

It’s the first time South Carolina has been shutout in the rivalry since 1989 and the Gamecocks couldn’t muster any offense again in front of a capacity crowd of 79,897 people.

“I want to apologize to our fans for our performance. It starts with me as the head coach. That Gamecock Walk before the game, I don’t think I’ve ever been part of anything like that in my entire coaching career. The electricity and energy in that stadium was amazing,” he said. “They were awesome tonight. Awesome. Sorry we didn’t play better for you.”

There is a silver lining for South Carolina, which is going bowling in year one under Beamer after being projected to win 3.5 games this year by Vegas and coming off a 6-16 stretch in their previous two years.

“We’re not going to let one game define this group. We’ve done way too many good things and fought our butts off throughout the season to sit here at six wins. This is a critical month for us coming up in December,” he said.

“Thank god we are bowl eligible. It’s a great accomplishment of this football team and I’m grateful we get another month together as a football team. We got to get better, continue to improve and this is just the beginning of Carolina football. We’re not going anywhere.”

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