FATHER, SON AND FOOTBALL
How Shane and Hunter Beamer bond over the sport, coaching
Before there were wireless headsets in college football, there was 11-year-old Shane Beamer.
The brown-haired, brighteyed boy traded in Saturday cartoons for hours on the Virginia Tech sideline with his dad Frank, trailing the Hokies head coach while dutifully carrying his cord. There in Lane Stadium, and at Murray State before that, was where Shane fell in love with football.
Three decades later, Shane is a head coach himself and has an 11-year-old son of his own: Hunter, the youngest of Shane and Emily Beamer’s three children. Hunter takes after his father. They have the same face and love of the game.
But football isn’t a hobby for them. Nor is it a simple shared
passion. It’s Shane’s livelihood. And one of Hunter’s favorite things to talk about with his dad.
The sport is a vehicle for Shane to share life lessons with his son: This is what hard work looks like; this is how you move on from a loss; this is what it means to persevere. For Hunter, it’s a pedestal. A stage that spotlights the trials and triumphs of his dad.
Of his hero.
“His dad hung the moon,” Emily Beamer told The State. “He’s very much proud of who Shane is, not only what he does for a living, but the kind of dad he is.”
Hunter doesn’t patrol the South Carolina sidelines, but he does watch staunchly from the Beamer family box. Superstition rules the room. If you step out to use the bathroom and something good happens, you’re ordered to stay put. Indefinitely.
For years the scoreboard dictated Hunter’s emotions. But now he observes in silence, only breaking it to debrief his mom and two sisters — Sutton, 16, and Olivia, 14 — on the cause of a botched play. He speaks fluent Xs and Os.
“Coaching is in his blood,” Emily said, “because he immediately sees things that the rest of us don’t see.”
LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON
As a child in Blacksburg, Virginia, Shane stood on the second-story deck of his parents’ home with a Fisher-price walkie-talkie. From there he sent plays to his younger sister Casey, directing her and a number of friends through an elevated game of backyard football.
Shane studied and stored all of Frank’s old playbooks — dating back to his time as defensive coordinator at The
Citadel — in his desk drawers. He hand wrote letters to sports information offices around the country asking them to mail him copies of their media guides.
Math and science weren’t his best subjects. But football players’ heights and weights? Shane knew.
Hunter has the internet, nationally broadcast games and “EA Sports College Football 25” to feed his gridiron fix. He’s memorized routes, schemes and game scores like they’re states and capitals. His parents are amazed by his depth of knowledge.
Every Thursday, Hunter asks Shane to go over fake punts or kicks planned for that weekend. Shane inherited “Beamer Ball” from his dad, a hall of fame concept that emphasizes scoring in all three phases. Hunter,
since-deleted post that Dinich’s comments were “trash,” and he appeared on a local radio show later that day to push back against them. Meanwhile, I scoffed. Nothing hurts more than the truth.
Sure, dissect Dinich’s quote as you please. Clemson’s defense has been more “pretty good” — by any statistical measure, the Tigers have fielded one of the nation’s best units over the last decade. The jury’s still out on Klubnik. A No. 14 preseason ranking isn’t astronomical.
But her overall point holds: Entering the 2024 season, coach Dabo Swinney’s program has lost the benefit of the doubt — and I think it’s both entirely deserved and entirely self-inflicted.
Clemson, rightfully, has had sky-high expectations each of the past three seasons. That sort of reputation precedes you after make six straight College Football Playoff appearances, appear in four national championship games and win two national titles, as this team did from 2015-20.
The shine of those two glitzy trophies sitting in the Allen N. Reeves Football Complex has finally worn off, though.
Since 2021, here’s where Clemson has ranked in the preseason AP Top 25 and postseason AP Top 25 (which accounts for bowl game results).
2021: Preseason No. 3,
●
went 10-3, postseason No. 14
2022: Preseason No. 4,
●
went 11-3, postseason No. 13
2023: Preseason No. 9,
●
went 9-4, postseason No. 20
GOOD, NOT GREAT
A 30-10 record in three years is strong — and more wins than 126 of the 134 FBS teams in college football, as Swinney made sure to point out earlier this summer.
It’s 94th percentile, “so you made a 94 on your paper,” Clemson’s coach said. “That’s an A. That’s good.” But not great, he admitted.
Watch the games up close, as I’ve done the past two seasons, and the need for a market correction becomes even more apparent.
This is not the Clemson of old, the explosive, backdown-from-nobody group that once lost seven games combined over six seasons. It’s a program that has struggled to totally capitalize on its talent — how about the 2022 team losing at home to unranked South Carolina and falling out of the College Football Playoff because of it? — and has taken a tangible step backward.
Quarterback play from former starter DJ Uiagalelei and current starter Klubnik has been occasionally great but occasionally unsightly, too, in a volatile way. That still generates nine or 10 or 11 wins in a season, given the team’s overall talent, but not a championship or CFP berth.
You could say the same about Clemson’s offensive line. Or its pass catchers, whose “WR U” T-shirts now feature the phrase “Prove It” printed underneath (points for self-awareness). Or its overall execution on the little things each Saturday.
Presiding over this subtle but noticeable decline is Swinney, someone who’s earned more money than 99% of us will ever see and changed this program for the better by doing things The Dabo Way. Now, however, he’s facing continuous (and valid) questions about his program’s lack of transfer portal usage.
A reprieve for some necessary counterpoints:
Yes, Clemson pursued a number of transfer portal offensive linemen last cycle. Yes, the Tigers have two blue-chip wide receiver recruits they’re beyond excited about. And yes, Swinney has been far from complacent — he’s fired assistant coaches, taken losses on the chin and, by all accounts, carried over the intensity he displayed around the building late last year into 2024.
Remember: The Tigers are 5-0 in the post-”tyler from Spartanburg” era.
PROVE ME WRONG
Maybe this group puts it all together and upsets the No. 1 team in the country as a 13.5-point underdog on Aug. 31 and I’m eating my words on my drive back to my Atlanta hotel.
More realistically, Clemson is going to lose to Georgia in the Aflac Kickoff Game. Then, before its season hits the halfway point, the Tigers have to play No. 24 N.C.
State at home and No. 10 Florida State on the road in what are essentially coin flips for a team that won just 50% of its ACC games last year.
The No. 2 team in the preseason ACC poll getting out to a 3-2 start and having to go undefeated from then on for a shot at a College Football Playoff bid?
Or starting 2-3 and taking a third, Cfp-eliminating loss before Clemson students even make it home for fall break? Entirely possible. Given all of that — and a reminder Clemson went from preseason No. 9 to unranked in a six-day span last year — is it really that scandalous to frame the No. 14 Tigers as overrated? I don’t think so.
I asked Swinney about Clemson’s preseason No. 14 ranking last week and he said the Tigers “don’t pay attention to that stuff” and are happy to be included at all. He then went on for another two minutes about how preseason
rankings are often a shot in the dark, and the last time Clemson was outside the preseason AP Top 10 in 2015 it was playing in the national championship game (fair point).
In other words, they do pay attention to that stuff.
“But nobody comes back and takes ownership of their great predictions and prognostications that
they had before the season,” Swinney said. “It ain’t about none of that. It’s just about having a great year and trying to be the best we can be.”
Until that happens, I’ll stay skeptical just like Dinich.
Clemson hasn’t done anything to change my mind.