COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina head football coach Shane Beamer followed up on what he talked about Saturday after the 38-28 win over Jacksonville State.
Yes, his team was in the locker room celebrating what is the third victory of 2023, but when practice resumed Sunday, Beamer made sure his team knew that the performance Saturday against the Gamecocks from Jacksonville, Alabama would not be good enough in these final three games of the regular season.
“As ugly as it might have been, the Gamecocks won the football game Saturday and there were a lot of teams across the country that did not win their football game on Saturday and that was the point I was trying to make,” Beamer said Tuesday at his weekly news conference.
” If we won on a beautiful Saturday afternoon and you were unhappy and miserable, then you probably do need to find some joy and celebrate wins a little bit more, as well. I am a guy that is always going to celebrate wins. I have been a part of teams where the head coach walked into the locker room after a win and absolutely blistered that team and they didn’t win a game the rest of the year. I said that I would never do that as a head coach. Did I tell them in the locker room Saturday that we need to be a whole lot better and that we were nowhere near our best and that we have a lot to clean up? Yes. But we also going to celebrate and never walk out of a locker room feeling like we lost the football game.”
South Carolina (3-6) will look for its second SEC win of the season when it hosts Vanderbilt Saturday at noon.