A dejected Shane Beamer walked into his postgame press conference after a 27-3 loss to Ole Miss on Saturday. He’s coached a lot of football up to this point, but this loss was about as tough of a pill for him to swallow.
“Probably the most disappointed that I have ever been as a head football coach,” Beamer said, “in the way that we played and that starts with me as the head football coach.”
It’s not so much the disappointment in South Carolina losing the game. More so disappointed in how it happened. It had two weeks to prepare for this game. Yet the results couldn’t have been much worse.
From start to finish, Ole Miss looked like the better football team on Saturday, the one that may have wanted it more. The Rebels were coming off a mistake-filled loss to Kentucky just a week earlier. But this time around, it was the Gamecocks making the mistakes in this game.
A lot went wrong for South Carolina. The decision to run a fake punt on the offense’s first possession, let alone on 4th and 1, didn’t work. Beamer wished he could have that play call back, but it wasn’t just that one miscue that caused the loss. It set the wheels in motion for everything that came after, though.