Shane Beamer recalls THAT Arkansas game
South Carolina head football coach Shane Beamer, then a first-year assistant with the Gamecocks, had a front-row seat to that Arkansas game.
Yeah, THAT one.
Any South Carolina fan who has been following the team since the beginning of the Steve Spurrier era or before, doesn’t even need an introduction. They immediately knew which one this story was referring to.
The game better known as “Hey, remember that time Darren McFadden…” The sentence could honestly stop here. And most everyone already knows.
But the full sentence is, “Hey, remember that time Darren McFadden ran for a bazillion yards on our defense?”
While some memories of particularly bad games may cue feelings of disgust or heartbreak, so impressive was McFadden’s performance — so dominantly video-game like his output on that night — many South Carolina fans almost seem to look back on it from the other sideline and just shake their head and laugh.
That was, in fact, Beamer’s reaction.
“I think they each ran for, like, 500 yards apiece,” Beamer said referring McFadden, Felix Jones and Peyton Hillis.
“My favorite memory of that game… I’m a young coach, it’s my first year on the staff,” Beamer said “I’m taking a backseat to the older coaches on that defensive staff. I’ll never forget, this is after they’ve gone up and down the field on us and the defensive coordinator is on the field and he’s talking to one of the coaches in the press box. It’s the first quarter, and we can’t stop them, it’s obvious. … The coach in the box is like, ‘Hang on a second, don’t say anything, I’m up here drawing.’ And the coordinator’s like, ‘You’re up here drawing?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m putting together a plan here that we can do some stuff to try and stop them.’
“And I’m like, ‘Aw, crap. If we’re up here drawing stuff up on paper right now in the middle of the first quarter, we’re in for a long night.’ And we were.”
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It wasn’t 500 yards a piece but it sure felt like it.
For those who were not around for that disastrous night in 2007, the Heisman candidate McFadden rushed for an SEC record 321 yards and a touchdown on 34 carries, adding a passing TD as well.
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Jones added 166 yards and three touchdowns on the ground, including a 72 yarder. Hillis had six carries for 35 yards.
As a team, Arkansas rushed for 541 yards.
Perhaps just as crazy as the record-breaking performance, South Carolina’s offense actually was somewhat able to keep pace.
Despite trailing for literally the entire game, the Gamecocks — led by 364 passing yards from Blake Mitchell and a 100-yard receiving game from Dion LeCorn — hung in there, cutting the Arkansas lead to 42-36 midway through the 4th quarter and needing just one stop to have a shot.
That’s when McFadden, fittingly, broke off an 80-yard touchdown on the very first play of the next drive and iced the game away.
Steve Spurrier, as he so often did, summed it up perfectly.
“Obviously it was a mismatch tonight,” Spurrier said, according to ESPN.com. “Looked like a Division III team trying to play an SEC team. Or maybe a Division III team could have slowed them down a little bit better than we could.”
Added Beamer: “That was a long night in Fayetteville, and hopefully we play a lot better defensively (this week) than what we did that night.”
Here’s some video for those who dare watch…
