South Carolina Coach Shane Beamer Had A Hysterically Matter Of Fact Response To Why Georgia’s Defense Is So Good

One of the challenges of coaching in college football is what the hell to do when you are facing a team that is flat-out better than you. There are times this happens in the NFL, for sure, but the biggest point spreads there live in the 13-15 point range. In college football, you’ll find spreads in the 30s and 40s, sometimes even in conference play when the very best in the country face off with a bottom-feeder in the conference and the world knows what’s about to happen.

South Carolina is, currently, one of those bottom-feeders. The Gamecocks are hoping to improve under new head coach Shane Beamer, but improvement in college football starts with recruiting and Beamer won’t have a team full of his own kids until at least Year 3. That means this year is about establishing habits and trying to lay a foundation of a culture, but it’s an uphill battle in the SEC each week, particularly when you run across a national title contender as they did on Saturday in Athens where they paid a visit to the Georgia Bulldogs.

Georgia won 40-13, cruising to a win despite some uneven offensive play that included a few turnovers, thanks in large part to their absolutely suffocating defense that gave up six points in the first three quarters and, in total, just 310 yards of offense for the Gamecocks. After the game, Beamer was asked what makes Georgia so difficult to deal with and he had a pretty funny (and 100 percent accurate) response.

“Uh, they’ve got like 100 5-star football players on their defense,” Beamer said. “They have a defensive lineman that ways 340 pounds and runs better than everyone on this call. They’ve got 5-star defensive backs. They’re big, they’re physical, they’re fast. I mean, other than that, they’re really freakin’ good. That’s why they’re the top defense in the country. They’re hard to run the football on, so there wasn’t some magical scheme they came out with tonight. They got 5-star recruits everywhere and they play really physical. Damn!”

That 340-pound defensive lineman is Jordan Davis, who is one of the best players in the country at any position and, as Beamer said, is a giant human who runs like this.

That’s terrifying! Sometimes, it’s just as simple as you don’t have the horses to run with your opponent, and that’s a tough, humbling place to be as a football team. Beamer wasn’t trying to be disrespectful here (he apparently later apologized to the reporter on the call), but this was a frustrating game and a simple question deserved a pretty simple answer. The task for Beamer is to figure out not how to out-recruit Georgia, cause that’s not going to happen, but how to get guys in that are, one, better and, two, fits for what they want to do so they can hopefully be more competitive with teams like the Dawgs and, possibly, pull off an upset.

That day was certainly not Saturday, and Beamer summed up why pretty well.