Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] On this episode of Cox Talking Gamecocks, reaction to the football team losing to Alabama, thoughts on Shane Beamer and a weekend recap from around Carolina Athletics. Okay, here we go.
[00:00:55] Okay.
[00:00:57] Welcome to episode four, 409 of Cox Talking Gamecocks. I am your host, Tim Cox, where I will keep every episode from 1801 to 2001. And are y'. All. Are y' all mad out there? Are y' all sad? Are y' all disappointed? Are y' all confused? Because I sure as hell am. Any emotion that you're feeling after what we witnessed Saturday night in Tuscaloosa, I am feeling as well. And I'm just jumping right into this. I'm going to do the weekend recap at the end, but it's. I'm too hot to not talk about this right now.
[00:01:38] What we witnessed Saturday night was embarrassing. I'm. I'm embarrassed. You know, I got. I got family and friends who know how much I love Carolina, who they say, hey, like that. That was an exciting game or whatever.
[00:01:53] And they're like saying, like, this is a tough watch. Like that. I'm embarrassed for our team.
[00:01:59] That was a terrible, terrible showing. It was a bludgeoning. And you lose by 31 points. It could have been 51 points, honestly, if Bama didn't take their foot off the gas. And, yeah, we closed the gap a little bit in garbage time, but I don't even know where to begin on this one. What we saw Saturday was an unprepared and undisciplined team.
[00:02:28] And frankly, it was an unserious showing after having the showing you had 2 weeks ago now against Mississippi State, which should have served as a wake up call to say, hey, you got some things that you got to iron out here. Communication on both ends of the football, you know, being able to be mentally sharp, knowing that you can't just kind of lean on some of your raw talent. You would think some of those things would have clicked for this coaching staff and roster, but apparently not.
[00:03:06] And I think the two opening drives sum things up pretty well.
[00:03:13] You open the game as good as you could have hoped for. 56 yard rush right out of the gate by Matt Fuller. You're in enemy territory.
[00:03:22] You're right there on the edge of your. Excuse me, you're in the red zone.
[00:03:28] And then what do you do the very next play?
[00:03:31] False start, move backwards, incompletion.
[00:03:36] Then you get the holding penalty, you're moving backwards, and then you missed the field goal. And I'm not even hating on the Missed field goal. Orson is a young kicker.
[00:03:47] He ended up having the. He made the kick later. But the fact was you were in the red zone and you pissed down your leg.
[00:03:57] And that's happened consistently this year, where you've had a big play and the team gets so amped up and there's a penalty and. And they move backwards, and next thing you know, you're out of scoring position.
[00:04:11] Then you actually hold Alabama to a punt. You get the ball back, you have a steady drive into enemy territory well within field goal range, and it's fourth and two, and you run the most bizarre play I've ever seen where it was the pretend to be confused quarterback tight end sneak.
[00:04:38] First of all, what the hell is that? Second of all, that play is not designed to get multiple yards. That play is designed to get 2 inches. It was 4th and 2 or 4th and 3. What were you trying to accomplish? Who greenlights that?
[00:04:54] And then you have no points.
[00:04:56] We could have been winning the game. I understand. There's this concept of not leaving points on the table, and you want to be aggressive, and we can debate going for it on fourth down or not. There it was a 00 game. In that moment.
[00:05:10] You squandered your opening drive. You could have taken the field goal. It was a closer field goal at that point than it was in the first drive. And you could have said, we're beating Alabama. We're up three nothing.
[00:05:23] And you could have said, all right, offense, like, way to go. We got points.
[00:05:27] Everyone take a break.
[00:05:30] Then Turnover on downs. 1. One play later, Alabama scores. They hold you to the punt, and then they're up 14 nothing in the blink of an eye.
[00:05:40] To me, that sums up what we've seen pretty well. Just an undisciplined, unserious approach.
[00:05:50] And then defensively, there were lapses of all night, blown coverages, blown assignments, poor communication.
[00:05:59] And then, of course, this all culminates into what we saw with Dylan Stewart yesterday, where he had a terrible personal foul. He was refusing to come off on the sideline, and coaches were arguing with him and amongst each other. And then, of course, there's the well documented blow up that Shane Beamer had to him. And then at. At the time, and I still feel this way because that was in the beginning, towards the beginning of the game, when Beamer yelled at Stewie. I think that was misplaced anger.
[00:06:33] Stewie had just gotten.
[00:06:35] There was the kind of BS roughing the passer penalty.
[00:06:40] He's been held every single time he's playing hurt.
[00:06:46] And I Think Beamer was mad at him that he didn't jog off the field, which, that was a domino effect from that moment on to the frustration you saw with Stewie throughout that game.
[00:06:56] Beamer is, of course he's frustrated with Stewart, but he's, he's mad at himself and he's mad at his coaches. And that was misplaced anger.
[00:07:06] And I think that that was an incredibly poor showing by Beamer. And I think that in that moment it encapsulated what I think we all know to be true and that I think Shane Beamer has lost his way and I think he's lost his handle on this football team.
[00:07:24] There's no more boogeyman. I'm going to have an article about this in the next day or so on Garnet and Cocky where I was watching this football game late in the second half and I just had seen enough and I just started writing down some thoughts. There is no more boogeyman in this program.
[00:07:46] It was always the offensive line is so bad. The offensive line coach is bad. The offensive coordinator is horrible. You know, we have a bad running backs coach who doesn't recruit.
[00:07:59] The defensive end coach just, you know, up and left us.
[00:08:02] There's no more boogeyman. There's no more scapegoat.
[00:08:07] Shane Beamer is at the top of this program and this team has consistently shown up undisciplined and unprepared. How many times have we said this team has been out coached?
[00:08:20] Shane Beamer hasn't won an SEC football game since September of last year and that was against the Kentucky team that ended up firing their coach at the end of the year.
[00:08:31] He didn't win an SEC game in October or November of last year and now we're through the month of September and he still hasn't won an SEC football game.
[00:08:40] Meanwhile, we've held double digit leads in multiple of those games.
[00:08:47] I don't know what this team does in practice. I don't understand how this team shows up with multiple false starts in key moments. What was it, three or four penalties in the first quarter alone? I think it was three in the first two drives, maybe even four defensively now we've given up 40 points in back to back games.
[00:09:13] You know, it's, it's tough because I thought that secondary was going to be a pretty good part of this team. But apparently there's some miscommunication or some gap in that group as well.
[00:09:33] And this is across the board, right? Like there is seemingly this sense of being underprepared like, how are we not able to adjust and correct some of the things that we're seeing in game?
[00:09:50] And again, it. To me, it just starts from the top, and it's a poor reflection on this football team.
[00:10:00] You know, I mean, you had an opportunity to start off well in this game, and in the blink of an eye, you were down a bunch. And then Sellers throws the pick six.
[00:10:13] And they shoved that statistic down our throat last night. When the turnover ratio goes against our us, Lenora's stats go down the tubes. And, you know, it just kind of was. Was that.
[00:10:32] So I don't know where we go from here. You know, it's. You're sitting at 2 and 2.
[00:10:37] You're 02 in the SEC, to be frank. You know, you weren't super competitive in either of those games. I mean, Mississippi State, yeah, that was. That ended up being a little bit closer. But, you know, again, like, you, like, you even think about that game and it's like, you can't afford to have these games where you're like, oh, well, it was one bad quarter, or, you know, we started the game poorly. You just can't do that in this league.
[00:11:05] You have to be consistent. Shane Beamer said in his press game conference that we're an inconsistent football team, and I think that is 100% true.
[00:11:14] You.
[00:11:14] You're not going to win games in the SEC if you're inconsistent, and you're also not going to keep your job if you're inconsistent like the players on this team. Right?
[00:11:28] You can. You can talk about college kids, get paid now. You can call them professional, you can call them semi professional. You can say that now. We can hold them to a higher standard because they're making money.
[00:11:39] I agree with some of that. I don't agree with all of it.
[00:11:43] The fact of the matter is, though, they're still college kids. They may be making money now legitimately, but they're still college kids. And they need consistent teaching and coaching and messaging. And I think within that building, they don't know what they're gonna get. And I think sometimes Beamer is the, you know, I'm. Put my arm around you. It's not, it's. It's not our fault. You know, there's things outside of our control, you know, and then I think there's other times where he kind of blows his gasket. And you saw that on the sideline, and that's hard to follow. It's hard to follow as a fan. It's hard to follow as a player.
[00:12:18] And so I think you've seen a reflection where in these big moments you're kind of all over the place.
[00:12:26] So you have two games until the bye week.
[00:12:32] You have one game at home against a Kentucky team that has shown to be pretty good this year. Then you're going to the Swamp against Florida, who seemingly has turned it around in under a year with their new coach.
[00:12:47] We're going to, we're going to need, we're going to learn everything that we need to know in the next two weeks and it's a tough place to be. And you, you look at this roster and on paper it should be pretty good, but again they're just not cohesive, they're not consistent, it's not disciplined.
[00:13:09] And to me that's a reflection of coaching and I think it's brials where like why are we consistently having these false starts? Like how come we can't capitalize on the big plays?
[00:13:26] Clayton White's unit giving up 40 points in back to back weeks, that's not the team that we know. I guess technically you got the, you got the pick six, but even so that's still over 40.
[00:13:40] That's not the unit that we know.
[00:13:43] So all of it is under a microscope.
[00:13:47] And you know, it's just, it's a shame, you know, I mean this was always going to be a tall task going to Alabama, right. And you know, in my preseason predictions I actually had us with, with the upset here. I thought Alabama was going to look different than they, than they do now. You had some folks believing that it would be a bounce back opportunity, one of those Gamecock games that when you least expect it, they, they pull it off for you.
[00:14:16] Wasn't the case.
[00:14:17] It wasn't the case. And you know, you just kind of sit here and there's not much else to be done.
[00:14:31] Again, there's no boogeyman left in this program.
[00:14:36] All the things that we've seen over the last year or two or more, it all comes back to Beamer and the culture or the not want to say the culture. But the level of preparedness I think is a, is a reflection on the head coach and on the staff. Right. And of course players need to execute. It's everybody.
[00:15:04] So look, there's still football to be played. But I think now it's at a point where yeah, like any conversation you want to have is, is on the table. I think, you know, it's not.
[00:15:19] I think what you saw against Alabama was, it's just, we are just far off.
[00:15:25] We're we're far off and, you know, if you can come back home and have a good showing against Kentucky, then, like, okay, like, that would be nice, but we just need to see it more, you know, like, we need to prepare differently. We need to scheme differently and act differently.
[00:15:49] There's a lot going on right now, and this has quickly gone sideways.
[00:15:54] And I think the Alabama game sum things up well, where you're just operating on a different level. Like that tight end sneak, I think it, like, that's like a joke.
[00:16:12] Like.
[00:16:13] Like, if a team were to do that against you, you'd be like, what the hell was that? Like, idiots with a chance to take the lead. And, like, that's what I'm. It's like Beamer just does some of these things. I think for the sake of doing it. Like, it's like, okay, well, yeah, we can't leave points on the table. We got to be really aggressive. Okay. Context matters with a lot of that stuff, right? Like, context matters when you're, you know, able to put, you know, your foot on the throat of the opponent.
[00:16:45] Yeah, be aggressive, you know, or if you're clawing your way back, like, okay, yeah, be aggressive. It was 00 at the start of the first quarter. Take the points, tell your offense that you can score. We got your back. Give confidence to your kicker.
[00:17:01] But no, we're going to run this play that makes no sense, and it's going to lead to a domino effect of Alabama just opening the floodgates and exposing weak parts in our secondary.
[00:17:17] And again, like, Bama took their foot off the gas like that third quarter, like, yeah, the defense played a little bit better for sure.
[00:17:23] Offense, like, didn't really do much. They made less mistakes, but it was like kind of a stalemate in that third quarter. Bama took their foot off the gas because the second we, you know, showed some signs of life, they scored at will again.
[00:17:37] So everyone has to go back to the drawing board. Everyone across the board.
[00:17:41] Offense, defense, special teams. Figure it out.
[00:17:46] And that all starts with Beamer.
[00:17:49] And if this thing continues to look ugly because there was some interesting body language and interesting interactions on the sideline last night.
[00:17:59] If this thing continues to go sideways, it's not going to end well for Beamer. So I can't talk anymore about it. It's just frustrating. And there's not more. Not much more to be said. You got your asses kicked and, yeah, like, you had opportunities early in the game to stand up for yourselves and make this interesting and put some pressure on Alabama but you didn't. You let them have it and then you end up getting your ass beat.
[00:18:30] So nobody to blame.
[00:18:32] Nobody to blame but you showed up unprepared.
[00:18:36] And make sure to read my article on Garnet and cocky.com for some more thoughts on it all.
[00:18:43] And let's just see how the next week or two plays out. But you know, as always, still gonna watch, still going to support because we wait all year for this and it's supposed to be fun, but it's not very fun right now.
[00:18:57] But all right, let's do a quick weekend recap from around Carolina. Athletics get some shine to some of their sports here. Going to go back to Thursday as women's soccer was in action in Columbia. They beat Kentucky 2 nothing. Equestrian. We're talking equestrian here. They beat Hollands 5 to 5.
[00:19:15] Must have been a tiebreaker here. Swimming and diving was an action against uncw, but both men's and women's got the dub. And equestrian was back in action Saturday morning, beating Sawanee 8 to 1.
[00:19:29] With that, y', all, that wraps up this episode. Please follow me on social media, Twitter or X is Cox Gamecox, Instagram is just the name of the show.
[00:19:39] Cox Talking Gamecocks. And please like subscribe and review the podcast. I appreciate all y'. All. Go Cocks.
