Shane Beamer not focusing on bowl eligibility in South Carolina locker room

At 2-6 going into the final month of the season, head coach Shane Beamer and the South Carolina Gamecocks are fighting to become bowl-eligible. To get there, though, South Carolina can’t afford to lose another game.

Despite being in that situation, Beamer explained that the Gamecocks aren’t focusing on bowl eligibility within the team’s locker room.

“We talked about it a little bit this morning,” Shane Beamer said. “To me, our mindset, like I understand when you go outside this building all they’re talking about is you got to get bowl-eligible, you’ve got to win four more. They know that.”

Next up for South Carolina is a non-conference game against Jacksonville State. That’s where the Gamecocks are going to be focused, rather than a potential bowl game down the road.

“We talked about it this morning that look, we are not going to talk about it in this building every single week. We understand what we have to do. We need to win four games to get bowl eligible. But the first thing, you have to figure out a way to beat Jacksonville State this week,” Beamer said.

“So, let’s not think about the anxiety of what we have to do. You can’t get the fourth win in a row until you get one of them. I know it’s cliche but it’s process. It is focusing on this week and what we have to do to be the very best we can be and be better than we were last week in order to play well against Jacksonville State and hopefully win the game. After that, we will worry about the next one and truly take it one week at a time because if you are thinking about things four weeks down the road, you are not thinking about this week and that is when you are going to get woke up pretty quickly, if you are not.”

Shane Beamer is in his third season at South Carolina. In each of his first two seasons, Beamer managed to go to a bowl game, with a 1-1 record in those bowl games.

Shane Beamer discusses how he’s handled 2-6 start this season

To this point, the season clearly hasn’t gone how Shane Beamer and South Carolina want at just 2-6. However, it’s been something that Beamer has needed to find a way to handle with a month to go.

Yeah, it’s been challenging. I mean there’ll be time at the end of the season to kind of sit back and talk about or hopefully in a couple months everything that’s happened and looking at it, why it’s happened and how to be better and things like that as well, but certainly did not expect to be where we are right now,” Beamer said.

“2-6, I think the last time I was a part of a season where you struggle that much probably was back at Mississippi State back in 2000, whatever I was there for, before I came here to Carolina. We had some seasons that we struggled there as well. You know, I’ve been in this situation at Virginia Tech where it was 2014, I believe, where we were 4-6 and had to win two games in a row to get bowl eligible. I think we beat Boston College up in Boston and then Virginia obviously at home, we had to beat the rival in the last game. So I’ve got experience with that. Hopefully that’ll pay off in four weeks.”