Paul Finebaum criticizes South Carolina's hiring process for Shane Beamer

South Carolina fired Will Muschamp in 2020 and replaced their head coach of the past five years with former Oklahoma assistant Shane Beamer. And unfortunately for the Gamecocks, Beamer has hardly impressed in his first season at the helm.

The Gamecocks are 4-4 to start the year, and some of those wins have been ugly. Beamer coached South Carolina to a 46-0 win over Eastern Illinois in Week 1, but then managed to beat Eastern Carolina by only three, Troy by nine and Vanderbilt by one — and the Gamecocks nearly lost to Vanderbilt until Zeb Noland pulled some late-game heroics.

The South Carolina program hardly looks like it’s improving from last year, and ESPN college football analyst Paul Finebaum criticized the university’s hiring process on The ESPN College Football Podcast.

“The great athletic directors should always have two or three names they should be in constant conversation with [as well as] Jimmy Sexton and search firms, but for whatever reason, a lot of times, they are literally caught off guard,” Finebaum said. “There was a job opening last season, and there were some really interesting candidates for it. And the next thing you know, Twitter and former players are starting to demand that one person get the job, and he did. It’s too early to tell whether that person has been successful or not, but that’s usually what happens, and that’s the wrong way to do it.”

As for who that one person is?

“Shame Beamer at South Carolina,” Finebaum remarked. “I was [at South Carolina] four weeks ago, and I could not believe it. They thought they were going to win everything. … I think [athletic director Ray Tanner] had a gameplan, and then it got blown up. As of this moment in the season in mid-October, it’s OK. The only way you know is three years from now.”

Muschamp amassed a 28-30 record in five years with South Carolina; the Gamecocks were 2-5 midway through the 2020 season when athletic director Ray Tanner decided to make a change. Mike Bobo took over in the interim, losing all three games with the title, and South Carolina finished 2-8 before hiring Beamer.

But Beamer, as many noted after the hire was announced, did not have any history as a head coach. A Virginia Tech alumnus, he is the son of legendary Virginia Tech head coach Frank Beamer, but Shane had not held a head coaching position before coming to South Carolina. He spent time as a graduate assistant at Georgia Tech and Tennessee, before holding assistant roles at Mississippi State, South Carolina, Virginia Tech, Georgia and Oklahoma, but never as a head coach, offensive coordinator or defensive coordinator.