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 salary in the game at the time – several subsequent extensions kept Saban at or near the top of the coaching compensation chart, 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.
No one heard… nor did anyone listen.
Now history isn’t just repeating itself, it is compounding the original error.
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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. Compounding 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.
But as calls for Beamer’s head rightfully intensify (for the record, I issued the first call on November 2, 2025), there is growing concern that the program cannot pay the freight associated with the long-overdue move.
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 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 season. Estimates for a full 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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Also, 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.”
Every penny that goes to buy out Beamer and the current staff necessarily limits what could be paid to replace them, too – which necessarily 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 sure seems as though he’s lost the locker room. 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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