Why hasn't South Carolina beaten Missouri under Beamer? It comes down to a few things

Shane Beamer knows it. In between all the success his team has had this year and even in years past, there’s always been one thing, well, rather one team, that has always given him issues.

Since becoming South Carolina’s head coach, Beamer has never beaten Missouri. He’s gone up to bat three times and come up empty each time, compiling an 0-3 record against the Tigers.

With another chance to get the monkey off his back this week, Beamer was openly honest about why the Gamecocks have yet to beat Missouri during his tenure.

“I would say they have kicked our butts physically, just to be completely frank,” Beamer said.

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Every week, Beamer comes up with a “plan to win” the game at hand. In preparing for the Tigers this week, he went back and looked at the six things South Carolina had to do to beat Missouri in each of the last three years. When he finished, he concluded that the Gamecocks whiffed on nearly all of their keys.

“If you take those six things and multiply them by three, that is 18 things over the last three years … we have lost 15 of those in our three games against Missouri,” he said. “The only things we have done well to win football games is, one year, we outscored them in the fourth quarter, but it was because we were behind. One year, we had less penalties than they did. One year, we did a decent job of stopping the run in regard to how many yards per carry they had.”

So why is it South Carolina can’t seem to beat this team? It’s not even just Beamer who can’t do it. The Gamecocks haven’t beaten Missouri since 2018, which goes back to when Will Muschamp was the coach before Beamer got the job.

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There are reasons behind the struggles. For one, they’ve had little to no success running the football against the Tiger defense. Games with 69, 32 and 57 rushing yards don’t exactly cut it. On the flip side, Missouri has ran for over 200 yards in two of the last three years.

Sticking with South Carolina’s defense, the unit has only sacked Missouri quarterbacks twice, which is hard to imagine with how things have gone this year. In Beamer’s opinion, the Tigers have just been more physical in each of these last three games.

“We have to perform better. We haven’t done a good enough job and give Missouri credit for that,” Beamer said. “They have been better and a lot of that has been our inability offensively to run the football against these guys.”

There is good news for the Gamecocks, though. They might not have had the things they needed to win this matchup before, but they certainly do now. They have a much-improved rushing attack that has gone from worst to fifth-best in the SEC with 180.7 yards per game. And they’ve ran for more than 200 yards in each of the last two games this season.

On defense, many opposing offenses have tried and failed to slow down this group. South Carolina ranks 12th in college football in total defense with the third-most sacks and are top-15 in turnovers gained.

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But the one area in particular the Gamecocks know they must be good is being the more physical team. This is nothing new for them, though. They’ve been asked before to do just that when Beamer challenged them to out-physical Texas A&M two weeks ago.

This might be South Carolina’s best chance to get over the hump and beat Missouri. The team is currently a two-touchdown favorite in many betting spaces. But none of that matters if they don’t play their brand of football on Saturday.

“Yes, (Missouri does) run a lot of different formations, a lot of different plays. At the same time, they’re a very physical football team,” defensive coordinator Clayton White said. “They’ve been physical in this conference for a while. They play good in November. … Obviously every day at practice, for ourselves against our offense, we want to play physical, have the physical mindset more importantly. Just understanding what kind of war it’s going to be on Saturday.”

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