Shane Beamer emphasizing eliminating slow starts for South Carolina

Slow starts to games have become a theme for South Carolina this season, a troubling trend given that two have come against conference competition. In both of those games, at Arkansas and then against Georgia, the Gamecocks were down by double digits in the first 20 minutes of game time.

Head coach Shane Beamer knows getting this issue fixed is critical. Playing from behind is no way to live, especially in the SEC where teams are more than capable of protecting a multi-score lead while taking opponents to the mat. South Carolina needs to get the issues ironed out, but solutions aren’t readily apparent.

“I don’t know. If you’ve got any ideas, let me know,” Beamer said on Tuesday. “We’ve tried to implement it with the way we start practice. We don’t just kinda stretch and then ease into things. We try and start practice fast every day, because that’s how you start games. So we had a walk through and we stretch and we usually do some sort of turnover, tackling circuit and a quick special teams period. And then it’s right to a competitive period or a team period or some kind of physicality like it would be in a game. We do that, we did it today.”

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Beamer added that South Carolina has tried taking the ball first in the last two games — coin toss dependent — to get the offense on the field and hopefully have a start that leads to points and a lead. It didn’t pan out against Arkansas when the Hogs won the toss, but the Gamecocks did get the ball first this past weekend against Georgia.

It again didn’t pan out for South Carolina, but for different reasons.

“The last two games,” Beamer said, “I can’t remember if we won the toss or not, but I think we did Saturday. If we win the toss, we were going to take the ball the last two weeks, which we’ve never done. We’ve always won the toss and deferred. And at Arkansas, I can’t remember who won it. But if we had won it we were taking the ball. And then Georgia I think we did win it and took the ball as well. Just to try and get our offense out there and get off to a good start. There’s things that we do at the hotel before we come over here, as well. And I don’t want guys thinking so much and pressing so much like ‘We gotta get off to a fast start. We gotta get off to a fast start.’ To me, it’s just executing. And Saturday, I think the pass to Jaheim [Bell] was on the first drive. Threw the pass to Stog [tight end Austin Stogner] on the first play of the game. And I want to say that pass — maybe Jaheim was the second drive. But we had a decent drive going on the very first time.”

But again, South Carolina couldn’t get into a high enough gear soon enough and got buried by the Bulldogs. Beamer and his staff will keep addressing the issue until it gets solved. The Gamecocks can hardly afford to keep playing from behind.

“We’ve just got to continue to look at our starting game schematically and then when we get out there, we gotta execute,” Beamer said. “Because it’s happened way too often, I get it. We’ve had way too many bad starts to games — offense, defense and special teams. I think this was the second game in a row that, defensively, we gave up touchdown drives the first three times that the opponent had the ball, and we can’t get stops. And we’re getting ourselves in a hole and it’s hard to dig out of.”