Shane Beamer shares first thoughts on South Carolina’s football game at No. 1 Georgia

South Carolina football coach Shane Beamer knows what his players are going to be hearing all week heading into Saturday’s game.

“Georgia, Georgia, Georgia,” Beamer said Monday in a radio interview, paraphrasing the understandable hype surrounding the reigning two-time national champion Bulldogs.

But if South Carolina wants to put together a complete game against No. 1 Georgia this weekend in Athens, Beamer said, that can’t be the Gamecocks’ focus.

USC opened as a 26-point underdog to Georgia, which has won back-to-back College Football Playoff national championships under coach Kirby Smart and — despite a number of prominent NFL departures from last year’s roster — is once again the favorite to win the SEC.

“We talk to our team all the time about not listening to the outside noise. That’s the good and the bad that you hear when people are talking about you, praising you and then criticizing you also,” Beamer said Monday in an appearance on the Atlanta-based radio station 680 The Fan. “We just need to make sure that from our standpoint, we do what we have to do on our end to allow us to go play our very best on Saturday.”

South Carolina, though, isn’t tackling Georgia week with the blinders fully on. Beamer said it’s impossible to completely escape that outside noise. His players are very well aware they’re more than a three-touchdown underdog to their SEC East rival, just like they were very well aware of their underdog status to Tennessee and Clemson last season.

Obviously, those latter two games ended up as monumental upsets for a Gamecocks team that won back-to-back games over AP Top 10 opponents for the first time in program history and finished 8-5 with a Gator Bowl appearance in Beamer’s second season.

After a season-opening loss to North Carolina in the Duke’s Mayo Classic, a game that exposed some notable offensive line issues, South Carolina got back on track last Saturday with a 47-21 win over FCS Furman.

Quarterback Spencer Rattler has averaged 349 passing yards per game this season, and wide receiver Xavier Legette (15 catches for 296 yards) is blossoming into a star as the Gamecocks open conference play with arguably their toughest game all year.

“Our guys know that we were a 24-point underdog to Tennessee last season, we were a 14-point underdog to Clemson,” Beamer said. “And we didn’t talk about that a whole lot last season. In those games, for us, it’s … Our guys know.”

“I mean, they’re going to be hearing all week about ‘Georgia, Georgia, Georgia.’ We just need to make sure that from our standpoint, we do what we have to do on our end to allow us to go play our very best on Saturday and that’s what we need to focus on.”

Beamer, a former Georgia assistant who spent two years as Smart’s tight ends coach and special teams coordinator, is 0-2 in his career against the Bulldogs.

Georgia beat South Carolina 40-13 in Athens in 2021 and 48-7 in 2022 in Columbia, with both blowout losses prompting viral moments of frustration from Beamer in his postgame news conferences.

UGA has also won seven of its last eight meetings in South Carolina. USC’s only win in that span was an iconic 2019 upset of then-No. 3 Georgia, in which defensive back Israel Mukuamu had three interceptions and unranked South Carolina won 20-17 in double overtime.

This year’s Georgia roster boasts junior tight end and likely 2024 first-round NFL Draft pick Brock Bowers, who Beamer described as “an unbelievable football player when the ball is in his hands and when the ball’s not in his hands,” as well as a first-year starting quarterback in Carson Beck and a roster that’s 77% comprised of former four-star and five-star recruits.

“To me, it’s just the size and the physicality that that jumps out on tape at all positions,” Beamer said. “They have the prototypical body types that you want in every single position on offense and defense. They play hard, they’re physical and they’re extremely well coached.”