South Carolina has a new pregame routine for road games. Shane Beamer explains

South Carolina has added a new wrinkle to its road trip routine.

Head coach Shane Beamer explained during his Tuesday press conference the Gamecocks have added a quick 15-minute walk-through of opposing stadiums when they hit the road this season.

Why? It helps with the jitters.

“Just trying to get some of the newness of (a stadium) out of the way on Friday,” Beamer said. “We’ve got a lot of guys — transfers, freshmen — that have never been to some of these stadiums. And when you walk into some of these stadiums — ours included — for the first time it can be ‘Oh my god,’ just how big they are.”

South Carolina struggled on the road in Beamer’s first fall as the head coach, finishing 1-4 away from Williams-Brice Stadium. USC’s only road win last year came at East Carolina in a game decided by a last-second Parker White field goal.

Beamer noted the pregame walk-through is something he took from his time as an assistant under Lincoln Riley at Oklahoma and Kirby Smart at Georgia.

“We have meetings (in the football facility) and then we go across the street (to Williams-Brice Stadium) and do our walk-through on Friday afternoons in the stadium for home games,” Beamer said. “Just trying to kind of keep that same routine on the road.

“We do our walk-through here in Columbia, but then we get on a plane — or a bus when we go to Clemson — and we’ll get off the plane and just go walk around the stadium. Trying to keep that routine. Then we leave the stadium and go to the hotel and start dinner and meetings like we do for a home game.”

USC heads into this weekend following fresh off a 38-27 victory over Vanderbilt 38-27 on Saturday in Nashville to reach bowl eligibility. Should the Gamecocks win their coming postseason game, Beamer would become the first head coach in school history to win a bowl game his first two seasons at South Carolina.

South Carolina beat Florida 40-17 in 2021 in a game that later prompted the firing of head coach Dan Mullen, who’s since been replaced by Napier, a former Furman quarterback ex-Louisiana head coach.

USC hasn’t won three consecutive road games since the 2011 season when it beat Georgia, Mississippi State and Tennessee over the course of seven weeks. The Gamecocks finished that campaign 11-2 with a final ranking of No. 9 in the Associated Press Top 25.

“We’ve been a little bit better on the road this year,” Beamer said. “I don’t know if it’s because of (the walk-throughs), but that’s how it started — just thinking about it over the summer as an opportunity to see the stadium and not let the first time we see it be on Saturday when we arrive. That’s out of your system and then all you’re thinking about is just playing well.”