South Carolina opened the 2026 season with a 57-0 win over Kent State, and the Gamecocks also showed off a small but meaningful change: six players wore captain’s patches from the start.
Those six permanent captains are QB LaNorris Sellers, TE Brady Hunt, LB Fred Johnson, LB Shawn Murphy, DB Gerald Kilgore and DB Peyton Williams. It’s the first time Shane Beamer has gone with permanent captains before the season begins.
That marks a shift from how Beamer handled the job in his first five years. In those seasons, South Carolina used game-by-game captains and didn’t settle on permanent leaders until the end of the year, when the team voted and the chosen players had their names and pictures added to the hall of captains with Gamecock greats dating back to the 1800s.
At last December’s postseason awards banquet, Sellers, QB Luke Doty, DT Nick Barrett, edge Bryan Thomas Jr. and DB Jalon KIlgore were named the 2025 team captains.
Beamer said he spent the offseason weighing whether to change the process, and the decision came down to the makeup of this roster.
“I’ve really been thinking about it throughout the offseason, if I wanted to do this or not,” Beamer said. “The primary reason is I just feel like this team is, as I told you guys, older, more mature.
I had a pretty good idea how the captain vote would go because we have so many. I knew we would have a lot of guys that would get votes.”
He said more than a dozen players received over 10 votes in the preseason selection, which he called “a really high number.” Beamer also met with every player who reached double-digit votes but wasn’t named a permanent captain, telling them: “(I) basically just told them like ‘You’re not silenced now. Continue to lead.’”
Beamer has long said leadership grows over the course of a season, and that was part of the reason he waited so long to name captains in earlier years. He also felt that approach made sense when South Carolina was bringing in transfers such as QB Spencer Rattler, OL Nick Gargiulo and LB Demetrius Knight, giving them more time to earn trust and take on bigger leadership roles.
That didn’t really happen last season. Beamer said South Carolina lacked leadership in 2025, and the team’s repeated blown leads reflected that absence. No one emerged to steady things.
This year, he made it clear to the six captains that the responsibility now belongs to them.
“Well, I’m telling you guys right now, you’re being named a captain so it’s your job to lead,” Beamer said he told the captains. “So if people say we have a lack of leadership, we don’t talk about the group. We talk about the leaders on this team.”
The setup still leaves room for change later on. South Carolina will vote again at the end of the season, and if a non-captain draws a strong enough share of support, Beamer said that player’s name and face can still go into the hall of captains. On the flip side, if one of the permanent captains gets very few votes, “(then) he’s obviously done a crap job of leading the team this year,” Beamer said, “and he may not be a captain permanently.”
For now, though, the Gamecocks are going with the group they picked in August and asking those six to set the tone.
“I like the group that they chose, and those guys take a lot of pride and ownership in that,” Beamer said "(Naming permanent captains was) really just more to just signify here’s our leaders, and let’s go play ball.”
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