ESPN analytics model's overall assessment of South Carolina football gives some credence to Shane Beamer's 'not far off' comments

Things haven’t gone according to plan for Shane Beamer’s 2025 South Carolina football team. Entering the year with College Football Playoff hopes, the Gamecocks own a 3-6 record and now have to win out just to reach the six-win bowl-eligibility threshold. Even doing that won’t be an easy task with a road trip to undefeated Texas A&M coming up next weekend.

Beamer has argued multiple times this season that his team is “not far off” from being much improved and challenging for a spot among College Football Playoff contenders once again.

SP+, an analytics model from ESPN, shows that Beamer might be on to something. A look into the numbers suggests that USC isn’t a good team right now but that the Gamecocks have a couple of good things going for them.

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But before looking into what it says, what is SP+?

Created by ESPN’s Bill Connelly, SP+ is a projection, not merely a ranking of what a team has already accomplished. Connelly explains, “What is SP+? In a single sentence, it’s a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency that I originally created at Football Outsiders in 2008. SP+ is intended to be predictive and forward-facing. It is not a résumé ranking.”

SP+ delivers data-driven evaluations of a team’s overall power ranking and efficiency numbers for all three phases of the game. It doesn’t necessarily explain how good (or bad) a team has been, but it does deliver data points that showcase what should be expected of that team moving forward.

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For South Carolina, the updated SP+ number isn’t great. The Gamecocks are No. 54 nationally and No. 15 in the Southeastern Conference. They only lead the Kentucky Wildcats in the conference.

Where there may be a slight silver lining to this gray cloud of data is in the efficiency breakdown.

Anyone who has watched the garnet and black offense this year knows that it has been a bad unit. The Gamecocks rank 84th in the country on that side of the ball, according to the SP+ offensive efficiency numbers. That is dead last in the SEC.

However, things look a little cheerier beyond that.

On defense, South Carolina is the SP+’s 23rd most-efficient defense. That is also good for ninth in the SEC. On special teams, the Gamecocks are No. 34, a number that is eighth-best in the SEC.

Those are not elite efficiency metrics for the defense and special teams. However, they are good enough for contention. Last season, USC was ten spots higher on defense (13th) and 15 spots lower on special teams (49th). That represents only a negligible overall difference from this year’s team.

The difference between the 9-4 2024 Gamecocks and the (currently) 3-6 2025 edition? Last year’s team ranked No. 35 nationally on offense, 49 spots better than this year’s group. The offense wasn’t lighting up the scoreboard, but it was solid as the ninth-best group in the SEC. Combined with the No. 6 defense and No. 13 special teams in the league, that was enough to be knocking on the CFP door.

Connelly’s model seems to suggest that South Carolina is a solid offense away from being a good football team once again. For the most part, the 2025 Gamecocks have handled their business on defense and special teams. The offense has been the primary problem. For much of Beamer’s tenure, the defense and special teams have given USC the chance to win. Because of that, it is no coincidence that the Gamecocks’ two best offenses under Beamer (2022 and 2024) came with the team’s best records, too.

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This offseason will provide Beamer with an opportunity to get things right with his offense. He fired offensive line coach Lonnie Teasley earlier this season. He parted ways with offensive coordinator Mike Shula on Sunday, as well, and, as GamecockCentral has reported, AD Jeremiah Donati is prepared to provide Beamer with the necessary resources to lure a competent playcaller to Columbia.

That hire likely will prove to be the most important one of the Beamer era to date. A good move could shift South Carolina back into the world of relevancy and postseason contention. A bad move will leave the Gamecocks “not far off” again in 2026.

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