Shane Beamer explains why Dowell Loggains is a good fit with South Carolina

South Carolina turned some heads around the Southeastern Conference when it hired Arkansas tight ends coach Dowell Loggains as its new offensive coordinator this offseason.

For coach Shane Beamer, it was a hire that screamed opportunity.

“I’m excited about Dowell and what he brings to the table,” Beamer said this week on The Hard Count with JD PicKell. “He’s a great person. He’s shown in his short time in college football that he’s a dynamic recruiter. He’s been great. He was a great recruiter at Arkansas and he’s been great in his short time with us already as well.”

The No. 1 reason that comes up when Beamer discusses the Loggains hire and why it made sense, though, was Loggains’ ability to blend a pro-style offense with the elements of college systems that have typically proven toughest to slow down.

“He was an exciting person for me to bring into the program because of recruiting ability, because of the person he is, but then his background is in the NFL,” Beamer said. “That’s basically where he’s been his entire career. So being able to take the things that he did in the NFL, which was important for Spencer (Rattler) when he was making his decision to come back, that we were not going to get too far away from a pro-style type offense.”

Dowell Loggains will mesh pro-style offense with college innovations

It’s unclear exactly what the offense will look like, but Beamer sounds confident it’ll be a great fit for what Rattler does. It’s a blend of pro-style looks with some of the things in college that have become popular in recent years.

“The thing that excites me about Dowell is he’s now been at Arkansas for two seasons and that system that they’re running at Arkansas, which is different than most NFL teams, obviously,” Beamer said. “I think Dowell’s been able to take the good and the bad from both of them and really blend it to be a kind of a — I don’t want to say cutting edge — but an offense that blends pro-style elements along with the college up-tempo spread type systems as well.”

That’s not to say it’ll be wholesale change. South Carolina is still going to go with what works.

“At the end of the day we’re going to do what best fits our players here at Carolina and the personnel that we have,” Beamer said. “But he’s got a background, Dowell does, coaching quarterbacks, whether it be veterans like Matt Hasselbeck or rookies like Sam Darnold. And being able to work with quarterbacks was appealing to me, and then obviously Spencer, as well, deciding to come back, a big part of that was the relationship he developed in a short time with Dowell also.”