South Carolina was on the wrong end of a 41-39 final score in Saturday’s game against Florida. And when the game was over, Gamecocks coach Shane Beamer had a lot to say about where his team came up short.
Things seemed to be going great for South Carolina. The Gamecocks trailed 27-24 going into the fourth quarter but took a 10-point lead with two touchdowns early in the quarter. The Gators, though, clawed back, scoring a pair of touchdowns to retake the lead, with the winning score coming on a 21-yard touchdown reception by Ricky Pearsall with under a minute left.
So, what happened? Following the game, Beamer was asked in a press conference what went wrong. Eventually, Beamer got around to talking about the coaching staff. But before that, he rattled off several places where he felt the players came up short.
“We call pressures and we don’t run them,” Beamer said. “We play man coverage and didn’t do a great job of keeping leverage. Just in the first half alone we ran a pressure where the corner came and for some reason he stopped. And we gave up an explosive pass because we didn’t continue to run the pressure. We had another pressure call where we didn’t run it in the first half. We had a holding penalty in the secondary in the first half. We had another pressure on third down, backed up where we’re going to be off the field in the first half and we didn’t execute it properly.”
The coach was not done.
“We talked to our guys about not jumping around the quarterback. We jumped and got beat on a pump fake. We had an offsides in the first half. Just did not play clean football.”
Beamer then congratulated the plays called by the coaching staff.
“And then at the end of the day, we had some calls that were perfect calls. We ran an edge pressure. If somebody said, ‘Hey, a team is getting ready to run a reverse, what would be the perfect call?’ You would bring both people off the edge. We did it. We had a perfect call sometimes. Their guy made the play and we didn’t.”
After going through all of that, Beamer finally commented that “We’ve got to continue to do a better job of coaching them and putting them in position.”
Beamer’s blame spree was not particularly well received.
[Jim Weber on Twitter]
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