Shane Beamer addresses South Carolina's turnover issues from last year

Last year, South Carolina led the SEC with 27 turnovers. That came after the Gamecocks had a league-high 24 turnovers in 2021 — Shane Beamer’s first season at the helm.

Now in his third year, cutting down those numbers remains an emphasis, Beamer said at SEC Media Days.

Beamer said the staff talks about those turnover issues quite a bit, but also spent time going over each one to find out what went wrong. While there are multiple factors that went into those struggles, both in and out of the Gamecocks’ control, Beamer knows it has to get better.

“We’ve talked about it a lot,” Beamer said. “And I think it’s one of those things you don’t want to, like, talk about it so much where it becomes the negative effect. I was at Oklahoma and there was a big kick about, ‘Well, we’re going to create turnovers defensively,’ and we went like three weeks and we never got a turnover. It was almost like they were pressing to make turnovers so much. We went back and we looked at every single turnover from last season, why it happened, what caused it, how can we be better? Whether it’s a technique that we’re coaching or what we’re calling offensively — and we all have a hand in it.

“It might be a poor ball security, you carry the ball the wrong way. It might be a poor decision by the quarterback for throwing a ball that he shouldn’t have thrown, it might’ve been an offensive lineman that turned a rusher free and resulted in a turnover. That happened against Clemson, as well. So things like that, we’ve just got to look at how to be better.”

Even despite leading the SEC in turnovers the last two seasons, South Carolina led the SEC in turnovers on defense. The Gamecocks forced 24 miscues in 2021 and 23 in 2022.

That means the defense is doing a good job taking the ball away. Now, it’s all about getting the offense to take care of the football.

“We’ve also led or been second in the SEC two years in a row in takeaways, meaning our defense is creating turnovers,” Beamer said. “So we’re doing some good things in practice, clearly. But we’ve got to be better and emphasize even more than what we already have.”

South Carolina went 7-6 in 2021 and 8-5 in 2022 after Beamer came in from Oklahoma. This year, as Spencer Rattler enters his second year in the system and with a new offensive coordinator in Dowell Loggains, the Gamecocks hope to take another leap in the SEC picture.

South Carolina opens the 2023 season against North Carolina on Sept. 2.