Shane Beamer talks South Carolina running back room, Christian Beal-Smith addition

The South Carolina Gamecocks are going to look completely different on offense next season. New Gamecocks quarterback Spencer Rattler might get most of the attention, but South Carolina has also made changes to its running back room.

South Carolina loses running backs Kevin Harris and ZaQuandre White, who were the team’s two leaders in rushing last season. But the Gamecocks added former Wake Forest running back Christian Beal-Smith. South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer likes what he’s seen from his running back room, specifically from Beal-Smith.

“Yeah, Christian’s done a good job,” Beamer said when asked about South Carolina’s running back room. “He’s an experienced guy. One thing we love about him is he’s been productive at running back, but he was really, really good on special teams. And he was a great cover guy. We showed the team a couple of weeks ago some of his clips of covering kicks on the punt team at Wake Forest. I mean, he’s really good at that. So he’s been good on special teams and just very businesslike and a hard, tough, physical runner for sure.”

Beamer likes the depth in South Carolina’s running back room

In addition to Beal-Smith, South Carolina has Marshawn Lloyd, Lovasea Carroll, JuJu McDowell, Rashad Amos, and others in the running back room. The depth is something that excites Beamer as the Gamecocks will roll out a very different offseason next season.

“Competing, you know, you got Marshawn, you got JuJu, I mean all those guys,” said Beamer. “Rashad Amos, I’m really excited about. He’s a guy that I think has had a heck of a spring through four days, but Rashad has done some really good things, starting back in January and February in our offseason program and then he’s taken that to the practice field as well. And then you add Christian, you add Lovasea, it’s a good group.”

When talking about South Carolina’s running back room, he also brought up the Gamecocks tight ends. With less depth in the tight end room, South Carolina is getting creative with finding more ways to get different running backs on the field in different spots.

“And you kind of go back last year at this time, and we thought, and we did, we had multiple tight ends. You know, we felt like EJ was going to be more of a true tight end. We felt like Jaheim was going to be more of a true tight end. You had Nick Muse, Traevon Kenion and those guys. And it’s a little bit different right now because you could look at us and say we’re deeper at running back now. So to me, it’s you don’t have as many tight ends as we did at this point last year. You got more running backs.

“Let’s figure out how to be creative and get more running backs on the field. And we’re always going to try and figure out who are our best 11, offense, defense, and special teams and get them out there. And we’ve got to be creative. We’ve been doing a lot of things with the running backs just to try and maximize their reps and put them in as many places as we can and do as much with those guys for sure.”