A few highlights from Shane Beamer’s postgame press conference Saturday after South Carolina’s 23-19 win over Old Dominion.
Opening statement
“Much respect for Old Dominion for the way they came in here and played. That’s a really good football team. We knew that coming in here. They certainly had our full respect.
“Unacceptable from us in the way we performed. Certainly happy to win. We’re celebrating in the locker room. Winning is hard. Some people may not like that. We celebrate wins around here. We’re celebrating in that locker room because our guys have worked too damn hard since January to go in there and have some fun and celebrate a win. We only get 12 of these that are guaranteed.
“Sloppy without a doubt in all three phases. We have to coach better without a doubt.
“We knew going into this game we’re a young football team. We started a true freshman left tackle, we’ve got a redshirt freshman quarterback. We’re going to have to live through some growing pains.
“A lot of teams would’ve found a way to lose that game. As ugly as it looked at times ... I thought we responded to adversity each time. Whenever something happened in one phase, the other phase responded and picked them up.
“We’ll learn from this one and know that it was nowhere near good enough.”
Injury report
Wide receiver “Jared Brown got banged up a little bit. It’s a lower body injury. I think he’s going to be OK.”
Bryan Thomas Jr. and Emory Floyd did not play but should be fine, Beamer said.
Defending the offensive line
“I know the narrative might be the offensive line struggled. The offensive line played their butts off tonight. All the gurus out there that want to break down the video, the offensive line played pretty good. ...
“We were atrocious tonight with perimeter blocking. That was a key with the way Old Dominion plays defense, our guys outside of the offensive line have got to be able to block. You’re not going to run the ball successfully against this team if your players outside your five offensive linemen don’t do a great job. ...
“The offensive line has to be better. ... It’s easy to say the offensive line struggled. No, the offensive line did a lot of really good things and played physical as heck.”
About the emphasis on the run game
“If you are able to keep the ball for 36 minutes like we did tonight and run 56 times for close to 200 yards, that’s not a bad formula. Absolutely we have to be able to throw the ball better than we did. ...
“Would I like to have thrown the ball tonight more than 114 yards? Absolutely. I also know that we’re going to get better throwing the football.”
On the fake field goal attempt
“It was something we have seen on tape that really should be more open then what we thought. We kind of wanted them to run through untouched and Deandre Jules blocked his guy a little bit better than we wanted him to. Kai did a great job making the guy miss. We didn’t anticipate him being there.
“... It was something on Monday morning when I was watching tape of their field-goal block team from last year. I went to (special teams coach) Joe Decamllis and said let’s put this in and rep it this week and see how it looks. I told them during the staff meeting this morning that the first time we kick the field-goal on the left hash we were going to run it. Hate that it came back. Kai (Kroeger) made a heck of a throw and Brady (Hunt) made a heck of a play.”
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