South Carolina’s 2021 hiring class rating is the last on the SEC across all recruiting platforms, but a large part of the 20-player group does not take into account the role of the head coach on paper Shane Beamer he feels he is going on the field.
Gamecocks led the SEC in transfers taken from the transfer portal with seven. It was in this area of today’s recruitment world that Gamecocks’ new technical team started work after the early hiring period in December.
Carolina signed 13 high school and college candidates, nine in December and four more in February. 247Sports Composite Team Rankings has this group of 13 signatories ranked 77th nationally and last in the conference. No other SEC team has had an autograph class with less than 15 junior college / college signatures. Eleven SEC schools took signature classes with more than 20 signatories.
“When you look at our autograph class number and rating, yes, it’s small and it’s low and that was on purpose,” explained Beamer. “When you talk about signing class rankings, nobody talks about the guys who were transferred, they are fantastic football players who will help this team right away.”
Terrible needs in the wide receiver, linebacker and defense became five transfers in those positions, notably the freshman record setting the Georgia Tech wide receiver Ahmarean Brown, 1.8m wide receiver stands out at all FCS conferences EJ Jenkins and inside the linebacker Debo Williams.
“Each coach sits here and says we meet our needs, but I really feel like we did,” said Beamer.
“When you talk about being able to add a quarterback (in Jason Brown) which was an honorable mention All-American, a wide receiver (in EJ Jenkins) that scored 13 touchdowns last season, another wide receiver (in Ahmarean Brown) who was his team’s best receiver at Georgia Tech and tied some of the receiving records for Calvin Johnson, a defensive defense at (David Spaulding) who has experience in a high level program like Georgia Southern, an edge rusher (in Jordan Strachan) who led the nation in bags, a defensive striker (in Jahkeem Green) who played for Nebraska and a linebacker (in Debo Williams) who was the player of the year in the state of Delaware leaving high school, is an impressive group.
“What those ratings came to be, I don’t know, but I know it would be higher than what it is now (if the transfer counted). All that matters to me is that these guys are solid people and are looking forward to being here in South Carolina. ”
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Beamer felt that it was necessary to follow this recruitment plan for his first recruitment class, given the time he was hired on the recruitment calendar and the time it would take to hire a technical team.
“It was important to keep (boys already engaged) engaged, take a deep breath, bring our coaches here and find out what exactly fits the systems we are implementing and then recruit for that,” said Beamer.
“It turns out that transfers were the priority this year. Let’s face it, many of these high school candidates signed in December. If the guys like Kolbe Fields I hadn’t signed, so we’re going full speed and that’s what we did. It worked out that most of the guys out there were guys in the transfer market. We dove into them. A big credit to so many people in this building who helped to deal with our recruitment. “