New York Jets offensive coordinator Dowell Loggains smiles before an NFL football game against the Buffalo Bills Sunday, Sept. 8, 2019, in East Rutherford, N.J. The Jets’ struggling offense will again be in Dowell Loggains’ hands this week. Coach Adam Gase announced Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2020, that his offensive coordinator will call plays for the second straight game after Loggains oversaw the offense in an 18-10 loss last Sunday to Buffalo. “We’re going to keep it the same,” Gase said. But the Jets will hope for a better result. AP Photo/Bill Kostroun, File)
AP
Shane Beamer’s phone never stopped ringing. At least that’s how he phrased it.
South Carolina’s second-year head coach — speaking last week during his initial Gator Bowl press conference — told reporters he’d received countless texts and calls regarding the offensive coordinator job vacated by Marcus Satterfield, who left to join Matt Rhule’s staff at Nebraska.
“There’s a lot more interest in (the opening) now than there was two years ago when I was trying to hire an offensive coordinator,” Beamer said. “The people that have reached out to me — from sitting head coaches to NFL coaches to current coordinators — has been pretty impressive.”
Head coaches. Coordinators. NFL staffers.
All that interest. All that hype. And the man South Carolina chose? Arkansas tight ends coach Dowell Loggains — architect of some of the least successful NFL offenses of the last decade.
“From the time that Coach Satterfield left, Dowell’s name was mentioned, among a lot of other people that had reached out,” USC athletic director Ray Tanner said Tuesday once Loggains’ hire was official. “We had conversations and then (Beamer) pursued the opportunity to hire (Loggains).”
Coaching hires, in reality, are calculated guesses. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don’t. That’s why the coaching carousel spins so fervently this time of year.
Perhaps Loggains will be the second-coming of ex-LSU passing game coordinator Joe Brady. Maybe South Carolina’s offense will light up the scoreboard with the regularity of Joe Namath’s Jets.
But with strictly a resume to go off, Beamer’s hire sure feels more like a bunt single at a time the South Carolina offensive coordinator job had a chance to be a home run.
Loggains isn’t without credentials. He spent almost two decades in the NFL, working for six different teams. He was a wunderkind of sorts, landing an offensive coordinator job in the league before he was 35. Few, if any, ever get that opportunity — let alone at that age.
The concern? The numbers.
Loggains spent parts of seven years as an offensive coordinator in the NFL. No unit he coached finished better than 15th in the league in yards per game. Those same squads averaged 18.5 points per contest and never concluded the season rated higher than 18th among 32 teams in average scoring.
That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence for a South Carolina offense that, beyond out-of-body efforts against No. 5 Tennessee and No. 8 Clemson in the final two games of 2022, bordered on malpractice at times the past two seasons.
If there’s a positive to be gleaned in Loggains’ hiring, it’s in Beamer’s desire to find someone befitting of the culture he and his staff have worked long hours to instill in Columbia the last 24 months.
South Carolina’s head coach is one of the few folks in a profession littered with snake-oil salesmen who few can muster a single bad word about. Genuinely, Beamer is as good and kind of a guy as it gets — and his staff and team follow suit.
Loggains, too, fits that mold.
Talk to enough people in football circles and they’ll tell you similar things. Loggains is one of the nicest guys in the business. He’s well-respected from the top of the NFL food chain to the college ecosystem. He, like Beamer, is beloved.
His recent track record in Fayetteville also indicates a net-positive addition on the recruiting trail. Loggains is rated the 22nd-best recruiter in the country by 247Sports. Four of the six players he’s served as the lead recruiter for during his two years at Arkansas are rated four-star prospects, and three are slotted inside the top 200 players in the 2023 class.
Good people deserve to be rewarded. Loggains, by all accounts, is one of those people. He absolutely should get a fair shake, especially for his history of treating folks the right way.
Whether that equates to wins … we’ll see.
“This is home run fit for the type of culture Coach Beamer and that staff and the players inside the building are creating,” legendary South Carolina quarterback Connor Shaw, who played for Loggains in Cleveland and Chicago, said in a video posted to Twitter on Tuesday. “I know the players are gonna respond to Dowell in a very positive way, and I’m definitely looking forward to what they do on the offensive side of the football.”
Beamer ought to receive plenty of credit. He’s elevated the Gamecocks to a point few, if any, thought possible two years after inheriting a dumpster fire situation from Will Muschamp.
Those positive vibes created optimism a big name might be in the running for the most consequential vacancy of Beamer’s tenure. Kendal Briles, Graham Harrell, Willy Korn, Kevin Johns and Mike Shanahan were theoretically out there for the taking. Whether they actually fit or were feasible for the job is between Beamer and South Carolina’s higher-ups.
That won’t stop the cynicism that’s permeated social media and message boards in recent days.
A press conference with Beamer will take place on Wednesday morning. It will likely include the usual fanfare of a major football hire. Loggains will be lauded as an offensive guru. His NFL pedigree will be touted.
Only time will tell whether Beamer got the right guy. Perhaps we’ll sit here a year from now, and I’ll offer a mea culpa if/when the Gamecocks offense lights the world on fire. (After all, I picked South Carolina to lose to Tennessee by five touchdowns this year, and look how that turned out.)
Until that day? Beamer better hope this works, because it’s hard to imagine his phone ringing off the hook if he whiffs on a second offensive coordinator hire in as many tries.
Ben Portnoy is The State’s South Carolina Gamecocks football beat writer. He’s a five-time Associated Press Sports Editors award honoree and has earned recognition from the Mississippi Press Association and the National Sports Media Association. Portnoy previously covered Mississippi State for the Columbus Commercial Dispatch and Indiana football for the Journal Gazette in Ft. Wayne, Indiana.