Watch: South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer goes on rant defending recent hire
South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer met with the media on Wednesday to introduce new Gamecocks offensive coordinator Dowell Loggains. Loggains is a former NFL offensive coordinator for multiple teams (Tennessee Titans, Chicago Bears, Miami Dolphins, and New York Jets). He most recently served as the tight ends coach at Arkansas from 2021 to 2022. […]
South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer met with the media on Wednesday to introduce new Gamecocks offensive coordinator Dowell Loggains.
Loggains is a former NFL offensive coordinator for multiple teams (Tennessee Titans, Chicago Bears, Miami Dolphins, and New York Jets). He most recently served as the tight ends coach at Arkansas from 2021 to 2022.
The Loggains hire has been heavily criticized due to his results as an NFL offensive coordinator.
Loggains' offenses never fared well in the NFL.
Here's where each of his offenses finished:
- 2012 Titans — No. 23
- 2013 Titans — No. 19
- 2016 Bears — No. 28
- 2017 Bears — No. 29
- 2018 Dolphins — No. 26
- 2019 Jets — No. 31
- 2020 Jets — No. 32
Those rankings obviously don't tell the whole story — Loggains never had elite personnel to work with — but it's still understandable why some folks have critiqued the hire.
Beamer apparently took issue with those critiques, which led to the South Carolina head coach going on quite a rant to defend the hire.
"So surely, everyone that wants to critique every hire that we make here, I'm sure you guys knew that Dowell Loggains turned down a coordinator job in the SEC last year," said Beamer. "Correct? Everyone knew that? I'm sure you guys know that I'm the fourth SEC head coach that's reached out to him in the last two weeks about coming to work for him. So we were fortunate to hire Dowell Loggains. Because there were a lot of other people who were interested in hiring Dowell Loggains."
"I'm sure you guys reached out to Bill Parcells, who Dowell worked for," added Beamer. "I'm sure the people on the outside, all the experts on social media, I'm sure they called Sean Payton, arguably one of the greatest NFL coaches of all time, to talk to Sean Payton about Dowell. I'm sure you reached out to Kyle Shanahan, the coach of the San Francisco 49ers. All those guys are guys that Dowell worked for."
There are probably going to be a lot of folks who say they get "Butch Jones vibes" from Beamer's press conference. Jones, who coached the Tennessee Vols from 2013 to 2017, would famously get defensive with the media when they pushed back on his hires or the job he was doing in general.
I understand that comparison, but I really don't think that's the case here. I think this is a situation where Beamer, who by all accounts is a great person, felt bad for Loggains and the criticism he was taking on social media. While the delivery could've been a little less confrontational, I think this was ultimately just Beamer standing up for the man he just hired.
As far as the actual hire goes, I think the criticisms were somewhat fair. Loggains has a lot to prove as an offensive coordinator at the collegiate level. But it's far too early to predict how he'll fare at South Carolina. We'll let the results do the judging next season.
Featured image via Matt Pendleton / USA TODAY NETWORK
