USC football added 20 portal transfers. Shane Beamer explains why

South Carolina has grabbed 20 players out of the transfer portal this offseason. That is a fact, one Gamecocks head coach Shane Beamer is not racing to tout.

Beamer, unlike some SEC coaches, does not declare himself as “The Portal King.” You won’t see him post a video with a “Portal Maestro” caption or go around bragging about all the new luggage South Carolina has inside the building.

But the truth is this: At the moment, only five schools in America have taken more transfers than South Carolina (20): Louisville (26),. Colorado (24), Texas A&M (23), Indiana (22) and Arizona State (22). And all of those schools either have a head coach who was just hired or who is heading into year two.

Beamer, meanwhile, is set to enter his fourth season leading the Gamecocks.

Led by Arkansas transfer tailback Raheim “Rocket” Sanders, South Carolina has rebuilt its running back and linebacker room, added three offensive linemen and a quartet of pass rushers.

A few Fridays ago, Beamer was at Lexington High visiting with head football coach Dustin Curtis and making it exponentially clear this is not how he wants to build a football program.

“He and I were talking about that — I would love to be able to every year,” Beamer said, “(have) the bulk of your roster made up of high-school guys and you’re using the portal here and there. That would be the ideal way.”

So why then, if Beamer simply wants to use the portal “here and there,” have the Gamecocks hauled the sixth-most transfers of any football program in the country?

Well, Beamer explains, it all goes back to the COVID-19 pandemic.

He was hired at South Carolina on Dec. 6, 2020, just 10 days before the early signing period began. There was barely time to keep together the recruiting class that former coach Will Muschamp left him, which included about as many bodies as you’d find at the beach during a hurricane.

The Gamecocks signed just seven student-athletes on early signing day, later bolstering the class to a dozen high-schoolers, one JUCO addition (LB Bam Martin-Scott) and 12 more transfers.

A year later, the numbers evened back out. The Gamecocks inked 22 high-school prospects but made waves by adding quarterback Spencer Rattler from Oklahoma — the headliner of USC’s nine-man portal haul.

But that cycle turned recruiting from an educated guessing game to a blindfolded dart match.

“(That was) a class where, because of the (COVID) dead period, we weren’t able to see any of those guys in-person until June,” Beamer said. “So I got hired in December (2020) and June (2021) was the first time I could ever lay eyes on anybody that we were recruiting — it had just been on Zoom at that point. So it made the evaluation process tough.”

That bore out over time — which brings us to the present day and the Gamecocks’ heightened activity in the transfer portal. To look at the Gamecocks’ current roster is to only see specs of Beamer’s first two recruiting classes.

Here’s how many guys from each class are still wearing the garnet and black:

(For reference, there are still nine guys from Muschamp’s last full recruiting class (2019) playing for the Gamecocks: QB Luke Doty, DL Alex “Boogie” Huntley, DL Tonka Hemingway, DE Gilber Edmond (transferred to Florida State then came back to USC), LB Mo Kaba, DB O’Donnell Fortune, P Kai Kroeger and LS Hunter Rogers.)

▪ 2021 — 6 // Three from HS (DT T.J. Sanders, RB Juju McDowell and DL Nick Barrett), one from junior college (LB Bam Martin-Scott) and two transfers (LB Debo Williams and DB David Sapulding).

▪ 2022 — 10 // Nine from HS (S Nick Emmanwori, DB DQ Smith, DB Emory Floyd, DB Kennan Nelson Jr., DB Peyton Williams, EDGE Bryan Thomas Jr., DL Jamaal Whyce, OL Cason Henry, OL Ryan Brubaker) and one transfer (EDGE Terrell Dawkins).

That means there are as many prep signees still playing for South Carolina from Muschamp’s final class (2019) as Beamer’s first full recruiting class (2022).

“I feel like the last (two recruiting classes are the ones) that we’ve really poured into, we developed relationships with over multiple years,” Beamer said, “and you hopefully can continue to lay foundations like I feel like we have with the last two classes where the bulk of your team is from high school and you’re not relying on the portal so much year after year.”

So while Beamer perhaps wanted to build a program of homegrown talent, he needed bodies. The Gamecocks lost over 20 players to the transfer portal this offseason, and trying to recoup those losses via high-school recruiting wasn’t possible or conducive to winning quickly.

“That wasn’t realistic for us after this past season because of some guys that left our program for different reasons,” he said. “Some we knew were gonna happen and understood. Some were frankly surprises, but when you lose some spots at different positions, you’ve got to replace them — partially at positions where you’re young.”

A new head coach should be able to build the foundation of his program with his first two or three recruiting classes. Beamer, because of timing and COVID, could hardly put together a first and was forced to take swings on the second.

It left him with a roster that needed revitalizing. He needed to stabilize his house and brick was easiest to find in the transfer portal. If done correctly, perhaps you need to replace a few bricks but there should be no reason to re-do the project over and over again.

“There was a lot more portal activity this season than we would like but I think every single year is different,” Beamer said. ”But if you can develop your roster, maintain your roster and then use the portal when needed — to me, that’s the ideal way of doing it.”