Shane Beamer pleased with how South Carolina 'handled' win over Kentucky

South Carolina is now through its bye week and will be looking to keep the momentum going, currently riding a three-game winning streak. Coach Shane Beamer was happy with how his team handled a pivotal win over Kentucky.

That was a heated matchup after some offseason drama between the head coaches, and the Gamecocks came out on top 24-14 and were not shy about celebrating the win. But Beamer said his players refocused fairly quickly, even with the bye week.

“I was curious to see, OK, what’s our mentality going to be at practice on Monday?” Beamer said. “It’s a Monday morning, we just beat Kentucky, everybody’s patting us on the back, telling us how great we are. It’s a bye week. They’re going home that weekend. And they were awesome last week.”

The road win over Kentucky was a big one, moving South Carolina to 4-2 on the season and setting up the Gamecocks with some momentum going into the second half of the season.

The slate coming up looks reasonably manageable, too, with the next month featuring home games against Texas A&M and Missouri, followed by road trips to Vanderbilt and Florida.

A bye week helped the Gamecocks rest and recover.

“We weren’t on the field necessarily as long as we normally are during the week, but we worked last week and really we got better, in my opinion,” Beamer said. “So I was proud of the guys, the way they handled it.”

Win over Kentucky is in the rearview now

While the Gamecocks had a chance to celebrate a bit longer, it’s time to refocus again. There’s an opportunity in the SEC East, with Florida struggling and Kentucky having been handled.

“Certainly it was nice to have a bye week where you could enjoy the win a little bit longer, if you will, because you don’t have an opponent,” Beamer said. “But it was right back to work and really for us it was trying to make them understand that we can be a lot better as a football team. That we did some great things in Lexington that night but we can play a lot better than we did in certain areas also, that we left some plays out there.”

South Carolina has a chance to exceed last season’s seven-win total in Beamer’s first year in charge. Getting past that mark has been a rare feat since Steve Spurrier‘s departure as head coach.

The Gamecocks have reached eight wins just once since winning 11 three years in a row from 2011-13 (Will Muschamp‘s squad won nine in 2017).

First up is Texas A&M. The two programs will kick off in Columbia, S.C., on Saturday at 4 p.m. ET, with a broadcast on the SEC Network.