by WILL FOLKS
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In the late fall of 2023, I had the opportunity to meet with several leaders of the University of Alabama system during a political event in Tuscaloosa. During our conversation, I asked them point blank about the secret to their unprecedented success on the college football gridiron.
Their answer came straight out of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.
“It’s simple,” one of them told me. “You find the best coach there is and you pay him more than anybody else.”
Alabama did just that in 2007, hiring former LSU and Miami Dolphins’ head coach Nick Saban and signing him to one of the most lucrative deals in college coaching history. With an initial base salary of $4 million annually – the highest in the game at the time – Saban stayed at or near the top of the coaching compensation chart thanks to several subsequent extensions, with his annual salary approaching $12 million a year by the time he retired.
Alabama won six national titles during Saban’s tenure, captured nine conference championships and recorded sixteen ten-win seasons. The Crimson Tide finished among the nation’s top ten teams in every single season from 2008-2023.
That’s right… top ten finishes. Every single year. For sixteen straight seasons.
Those are outcomes University of South Carolina fans can only dream of attaining…
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South Carolina has just four (4) ten-win seasons in its entire program history. The school has won zero (0) national titles, one conference championship (the 1969 ACC crown) and finished in the top ten just three (3) times. Now, for the second time in the past six years, the school’s poor choice of a head coach – and its foolhardy haste to reward fleeting “success” – have landed it in a definitionally untenable situation.
South Carolina desperately needs to make a head coaching change… again… but the program appears to be stuck.
The ongoing collapse traces its roots to October 2015 when former Gamecock head coach Steve Spurrier – who authored those three top ten finishes – resigned from the program mid-season. Spurrier’s decision to go out on his own terms was heartbreaking to many fans, but it had the benefit of giving former athletics director Ray Tanner a jump on the coaching carousel.
Tanner utterly failed to capitalize on his head start, though, and South Carolina got stuck with former Florida head coach Will Muschamp. Having already demonstrated his limitations running a program, Muschamp unsurprisingly underwhelmed – and was subsequently run out of Columbia on a rail during his fifth season. He finished his disastrous tenure in Columbia with a 28-30 (.482) overall record, a 17-22 (.435) conference mark and a 3-15 (.166) record against ranked opponents. “Coach Boom” was 1-2 (.333) in bowl games – and failed to beat arch-rival Clemson in four tries.
Adding insult to injury, Tanner and the school’s leadership botched Muschamp’s buyout – resulting in a $15.3 million hit to the program’s finances (Muschamp ultimately settled with the school for a lump sum payout of $12.9 million).
Still, Muschamp’s prohibitively high payout not only kept him on the job much longer than necessary – it limited South Carolina’s options when the school was finally able to choose his successor.
Accordingly, the school had to settle for Shane Beamer in 2021.
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As our media outlet observed at the time, Beamer was “a second-tier hire in a year that did not boast the same level of coaching talent South Carolina could have landed five years ago (in 2015).”
Like Muschamp, though, Beamer bested expectations during his first two campaigns – resulting in the first renegotiation of his contract following an 8-5 season in 2022. In encouraging the school to reward him with a raise and an extension at the time, this reporter warned Gamecock leaders (twice) to “be careful” and “be smart” regarding Beamer’s buyout.
“While Beamer certainly seems in line for a pay bump and contract extension given his performance through two seasons, I would caution (the school) from entering into any agreement which includes the sort of massive, guaranteed buyout Muschamp received,” I noted in late November 2022.
“In South Carolina, there is a long history of incentivizing failure – or at the very least incentivizing mediocrity,” I added the following month. “That happened with Muschamp, and South Carolina paid dearly for its mistake. It cannot repeat the same mistake with Beamer.”
“Hear me now, listen to me later,” I added.
Well, no one heard… nor did anyone listen.
Now history isn’t just repeating itself, the original error is being compounded.
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The descent has been as fast as it has been steep. After soaring to the cusp of the College Football Playoff in 2024, Beamer’s team has been in free-fall mode ever since. South Carolina hasn’t won a conference game since last September – and is one for its last eleven against SEC foes. Augmenting the agony, the Gamecocks blew double digit leads in three of their last four SEC losses – including last weekend’s heartbreaking overtime defeat at the hands of Kentucky.
Beamer’s teams are loaded to the gills with raw, athletic talent – but they are underutilized, undisciplined and inconsistent. All of which comes down to coaching.
Through sixty-eight games at the helm of the program, Beamer is now 35-33 (.514) overall – with an atrocious 16-27 (.372) mark against conference opponents. His teams are 7-23 (.233) against ranked foes, 1-2 (.333) in bowl games and 2-3 (.400) against Clemson.
Calls for Beamer’s head are rightfully intensifying. And for the record, I issued the first call back on November 2, 2025 (a week before the team’s history-making collapse against Texas A&M). But while there is near universal realization that Beamer is no longer the right man for the job – a corresponding realization is that the program may be unable to pay the huge freight associated with the long-overdue move.
At least not without blowing its chance at a credible successor…
After two raises and a pair of contract extensions within the last four years, Beamer is currently sitting on a massive buyout of $24 million – an amount that’s nearly double his original, five-year contract with South Carolina. Suffering through the end of the year doesn’t seem to be a much more palatable option, either, as waiting another seven games to fire him would only whittle the damage down to $22.8 million.
The tab to hit “reset” doesn’t stop with Beamer, either. Both of South Carolina’s top two coordinators – Kendal Briles on offense and Clayton White on defense – would be owed more than $4 million apiece if they were fired following the current season. Estimates for a complete coaching clear-out at South Carolina range between $40-50 million, according to mainstream media reports.
And that’s before a single penny is paid on coaches to replace them…
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All of this is unfolding in the midst of a massive $350 million renovation to Williams-Brice Stadium – and just weeks after the sudden death of the Gamecocks’ most well-known financial benefactor, Charleston, S.C. attorney Joseph F. Rice.
“The school simply doesn’t have it,” columnist David Cloninger of The (Charleston, S.C.) Post and Courier reported this week, referring to the financial resources required for a coaching reboot. “While there would always be a chance somebody would pony up and pay the bill, who would it be? The only man with that kind of scratch and willingness to help is sadly no longer with us.”
“With Joe Rice passing away, the Gamecocks have lost their sugar daddy who could give and help raise transformational money,” a source close to the program told us. “The Blanchard boys are the only other donors that have the cash and may have the inclination to either prop up Beamer or fund a new coaching staff.”
That’s a reference to Boyd Blanchard and Rozier Blanchard, brothers whose last name adorns both 25-yard lines at Williams-Brice.
Whoever winds up footing the bill, it’s worth remembering that every penny spent on buying out Beamer and the current staff necessarily limits what can be paid to replace them – which, in turn, limits the quality of the replacements.
Which is exactly how the program got into its current hole…
Beamer has lost the donors. Lost the media. Lost the fan base. And it certainly seems as though he’s lost the locker room, too. Yet he hasn’t lost his job?
How does that happen?
More importantly… how does Gamecock football make sure it never happens again?
Stay tuned for my next column, which will include some thoughts on what’s required for a fundamental reorientation… one that doesn’t dig this program’s hole any deeper than it already is.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
Will Folks is the founding editor of the news outlet you are currently reading. Prior to founding FITSNews, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and eight children.
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8 comments
Gamecock football is forever trying to light the current pile of money on fire as fast as possible so you can get to the next pile of money to light on fire.
Certainly coaches and those who hire them get blamed for bad records and seasons. On the other hand, the coaching staff are NOT the ones on the field, playing the game and making the mistakes.It’s the players they’ve added to the team.
It fits the brand:USC is mediocre at best! just look at what walks in and out of Osborne on a day to day basis.
And Will: since when was football part of the mission of higher education?
Oh come on now, next thing you’re going to tell us is that shagging golf balls at a driving range isn’t a college level education.
Excellent point. I tell people that I graduated from the University of South Carolina, NOT the University of Football.
The University of South Carolina could save about $7 million dollars by purchasing a structured annuity.
As a certified mediator, I’ve seen insurance companies save money using this tool. For example, the current Beamer Buyout would cost the University about $22.8 million dollars if Coach Beamer was fired.
But that big number could be reduced by about $8.4 million dollars by offering Beamer a twenty year annuity contract that would pay him $95,000.00 monthly over twenty years. It would also benefit Coach Beamer by substantially reducing his state and federal income tax liability. That would be a win/win for both parties. Beamer is a honorable man but he just hasn’t been many football games winning lately.
“But that big number could be reduced by about $8.4 million dollars by offering Beamer a twenty year annuity contract that would pay him $95,000.00 monthly over twenty years.”
Am I reading this right?
$95K x 12 x 20 = $38,800,000.00 that is “about” $38.8 million + compound interest, which to my SubZeroIQ is “about” four to five times greater than “$8.4 million.”
But what really puzzles me is: what does a head football coach actually do to justify $38.8 million or $8.4 million or any million or any money for that matter?
He wears earphones and a movable microphones and paces the sidelines looking important, concerned, and often angry. But about what?
It’s not as if he were directing a rocket launch or monitoring a landing on the moons.
It’s not even as if the head coach invents or innovates a play unheard of.
It’s not even as if the combinations and permutations of football plays were as great as the number of moves in a chess match.
Am I wrong? There are only a limited number of moves in football and they have all been more or less known and played since football itself came into being.
It’s not as if, without a coach, the players left to their own devices will stand hopelessly lost in the field and would manage to only trash-talk each other.
I may have just blasphemed to GameCocks Nation and perhaps all football fans.
So, let me go all the way and say it: in a real democracy, there would be no football head coach at all. Instead, the players would be left to design their own plays and vote among themselves who plays what role, for how long, and how often.
Of course, others are needed: the physical trainers, the equipment providers, the academic advisors, the medics, etc. But all those, specially the team physician, do NOT take the directions or knowledge base from the head football coach.
So, let me propose to USC that it go without a head football coach for an experimental year of forever and see what happens.
After all, and yes, you should have seen that coming, I am the one who, thank God, did for myself WITHOUT A LAWYER what Alex Murdaugh’s whole defense team could not do for him: prevent a jury from returning a wrongful conviction.
And I am the one who often cites the valid statistical studies showing that self-represented criminal defendants achieve a higher acquittal rate than represented ones.
Perhaps experimentation will show that self-governing college football teams without a head coach will achieve more wins than ones headed by head coach. Or perhaps not. Only experimentation will answer. USC should offer itself for such experiment just as a terminal patient offers to enter a study of a last-hope new drug. What is there to be lost?
Why not just admit that the football program will never be more than mediocre at best. Maybe it’s the “Chicken Curse,” but it’s probably just poor leadership in the form of athletic directors Ray Tanner and his successor. That said, just use the football program as a money-maker to fund the other athletic programs. Women’s basketball, soccer, and softball and maybe even men’s basketball and baseball come to mind. You have a football fan base that is so dedicated that it averaged 75,000 fans à game when Lou Holtz went 0-11 that year and would today fill the stadium to see the inter-fraternity finals. That, and the generous SEC contributions compile a ton of money that could be put to a better use.