South Carolina Football: Shane Beamer called bottom-tier coach who "hasn't had success" with Gamecocks

South Carolina football fans (and college football fans across the country) trying to get their pigskin fix really only have "talking season" material to consume right now. Football news is limited this time of year as recruiting is relatively slow, spring practice hasn't begun, and the transfer portal is closed.

Whether it's written articles, radio programming, television debates, or podcast discussions, offseason chatter tends to devolve into "let's rank something" conversations when the news cycle is slow.

That was true this week when the popular Cover 3 Podcast decided to put the SEC head coaches into tiers as a pseudo-ranking of the men leading programs in the nation's best conference.

Hosts Chip Patterson, Tom Fornelli, and Bud Elliott ranked the SEC headmen by putting them into four tiers. Other than some brief squabbling about Lane Kiffin, the three-man panel agreed on their tiers of Southeastern Conference coaches.

The general consensus of the tiers (no rankings within tiers):
Tier 1: Kirby Smart
Tier 2: Brian Kelly, Kalen DeBoer, Steve Sarkisian
Tier 3: Mike Elko, Josh Heupel, Lane Kiffin, Eli Drinkwitz, Mark Stoops, Hugh Freeze
Tier 4: Shane Beamer, Clark Lea, Jeff Lebby, Billy Napier, Sam Pittman, Brent Venables

It seems disrespectful to Shane Beamer to have him in the fourth tier. Part of the issue is that the exercise needs a 5th tier. In no world should Clark Lea, Sam Pittman, and first-year head coach Jeff Lebby should be in the same tier as Beamer.

However, in addition to the improper placement of the South Carolina football headman, Elliott had some harsh things to say about Beamer. The biggest slight against the head Gamecock was Elliott's quip that "Beamer hasn't had success at South Carolina."

Considering what Beamer inherited when he took the job, saying that he hasn't had any success in Columbia is an unfair assessment. The Gamecocks outperformed expectations in both 2021 and 2022, and the underperforming effort in 2023 largely was influenced by injury. Recruiting has been better under Beamer from a per-player perspective, as well.

Has the Shane Beamer era in Columbia been on par with the coaches in Patterson, Elliott, and Fornelli's tiers 1 and 2? No. But he is 2-1 against Mark Stoops (tier 3), and there is no other coach in tier 4 who has accomplished as much as he has in their current jobs with the possible exception of Brent Venables (but it's Oklahoma; winning 16 games in two years is the bare minimum).

To make matters worse, there was no discussion about Beamer's positioning at all. All three hosts simply accepted that he is on the same level as a first-year coach, two guys who are dead men walking, a defensive coordinator, and the guy leading Vanderbilt. The analysis (or lack thereof) simply was lazy.

You can watch the entire discussion below.