South Carolina coach Shane Beamer doesn’t treat “the book” like a commandment on the sideline, and that says plenty about how he handles game-day decisions.
“The book” is the CAI game guide that’s become a fixture for more than 100 FBS programs and at least a quarter of the NFL. It lays out, in blunt mathematical terms, what coaches should do in just about every live-game situation: go for it on fourth down, chase two points, burn a timeout, kick the field goal. The whole thing is built around charts and heat maps, with the right move color-coded based on down, distance, field position and game situation.
But Beamer doesn’t lean on a dedicated “book guy” to sort through it all in real time, and he said he only looks at it during games about twice a year. Instead, he does most of that work before kickoff.
“I spend a lot of time throughout the week watching offense and defense and special teams,” Beamer said, “and preparing for the situations that come up in a game and what my mindset is gonna be.”
He also pointed out that the book itself is only part of what CAI sends coaches. Each Wednesday, the company delivers a broad report breaking down situations from the previous week across college football and the NFL, and Beamer said he digs into that immediately.
“Every week, they give you a huge report of every situation that has come up across college football and the NFL from the week before,” Beamer said. “I live for that when I get that on Wednesday nights because I can immediately dive into it, read about everything - NFL and college - that happened and (think), ‘What would I do in that situation?’”
That puts Beamer somewhere in the middle of the coaching spectrum. Shawn Elliott, now South Carolina’s tight ends coach, sits much closer to the traditional end of it. He said he wanted no part of analytics when he was the head coach at Georgia State.
“We did not use analytics at all,” Elliott told The State. “For me, if I was still in that role, I still probably wouldn’t use ‘the book.’”
On the other side are coaches like Army’s Jeff Monken and LSU’s Lane Kiffin, one of the early adopters who used it at FAU and kept using it at Ole Miss. Kiffin has long argued that the old-school approach is too cautious.
“The old-school way (of coaching), from an analytics standpoint, is extremely conservative,” Kiffin said in a 2020 interview. “There are so many more times you should be going for it and not kicking long field goals.”
Beamer may not rely on the book like a cheat sheet, but his decisions still often line up with the numbers. At the same time, he’s also shown a willingness to push the envelope. Last season, South Carolina attempted more fourth downs than any SEC team, including Kiffin’s Ole Miss, though the Gamecocks converted only 16 of 32, which ranked 14th in the league.
Across Beamer’s five seasons at South Carolina, the Gamecocks have converted 64 of 132 fourth-down tries, a 48% success rate.
After each week, Beamer also gets a Monday report that grades the decisions he made in the previous game and shows whether they matched the analytics. Sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes the report says he should have punted or kicked instead.
“But,” Beamer said, “I’d say more often than not, we’re on the same page with them.”
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