Why Dowell Loggains’ closest confidants insist he’ll succeed at South Carolina

Dowell Loggains sat quietly to the right side of the defensive meeting room inside South Carolina’s Long Family Football Operations Center.

Listening intently, a Dasani water bottle by his side, he glanced around the room brimming with writers and TV cameras while his new boss, Shane Beamer, spewed fire from the lectern.

Beamer opened Loggains’ Dec. 14 introductory press conference, biting back at the critics of his hire to replace offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield, who departed for the same gig at Nebraska. He touted the list of trusted people he chatted with about Loggains’ track record — including Sean Payton, Bill Parcells and Sylvester Croom.

“I’m sure you guys knew that Dowell Loggains turned down a coordinator job in the SEC last year, correct? Everybody knew that, right?” a feisty Beamer asked, not really looking for an answer. “I’m sure you guys knew that I’m the fourth SEC head coach that’s reached out to him in the last two weeks about coming to work for him.”

Vitriol is nothing new to the 42-year-old Loggains. He spent time calling plays for the Chicago Bears and New York Jets, jobs that come with unique sets of boisterous detractors.

But the NFL has its way of gobbling up coaches and spitting them out. Ill-fated runs in Miami, Chicago and New York, in part, sent Loggains back to his alma mater of Arkansas for a career reboot in 2020 after almost two decades in professional football.

That track record led to ample skepticism upon his hiring. Still, Beamer lauded the laundry list of coaches who worked with Loggains that he spoke to about his potential fit at South Carolina.

The State reached out to all seven coaches Beamer mentioned in that introductory press conference, in addition to a handful of others close to Loggains, to understand how the one-time Razorbacks quarterback might fit in Columbia as a top assistant coach.

The skinny from those who responded? South Carolina’s new offensive coordinator has plenty of people in his corner.

“Honestly, Dowell should still be in the NFL,” former Titans quarterback Chris Simms, who played for Loggains in Nashville, told The State. “He got, unfortunately, stuck on a few bad coaching staffs and got a part of the politics of football and that kind of sidetracks things.

“That’s what can happen in the NFL, unfortunately. You’re on two bad staffs in a row then all of a sudden perception becomes a reality.”

An Arkansas walk-on turned NFL coach

Loggains never had any real fixations on playing college football. If anything, it was a means to getting into coaching.

He grew up an Arkansas fan, attending camps in Fayetteville from the time he was 10 years old and growing up in Abilene, Texas. Coaches joked he’d been there for 40 or 50 years by the time he actually made it back to campus as a coach two seasons ago.

“Never in a million years dreamed about getting on the field,” Loggains told The State.

His 5-foot-6 frame notwithstanding, Loggains pleaded his case to head coach Houston Nutt early in his freshman year in 2000 to be the holder on field goals and extra points and signal plays from the sideline.

Loggains spent the summer taking the kickers out regularly, hoping they’d vouch for him when the time came. They did. So there in the head coach’s office, Nutt quizzed Loggains on the intricacies of the offense. Loggains nailed the calls one by one.

Beginning camp as the backup holder and fourth-team quarterback, there was a swagger — or perhaps stubbornness — about Loggains. Each day coaches called for the field-goal team to line up, he ran out with the first team every single time. Each day he was yanked back to the sideline.

The charade went on for three days. Thrice Loggains was whisked back to the bench. Until he wasn’t.

“I run out and no one says anything,” Loggains recounted. “I look around like, OK. So I get down, hold the snap, we go three kicks and next thing you know I’m the holder. I don’t know how this happened. It literally was like I was gonna make them tell me ‘no’ every day.”

Holding and signaling duties aside, Loggains still operated more as a coach than a player during his playing days at Arkansas. He spent time in meetings with Nutt and the staff during his final year as a player, working as a pseudo-graduate assistant while still technically having eligibility.

Loggains’ teammates even elected him a captain during the arrangement, though he turned it down, feeling it was inappropriate to be in coaches meetings while also representing the players.

“The biggest thing that I think the South Carolina fans should know, or the players should know is that a lot of times he could have been in this room playing video games or whatever,” Nutt said. “Two hours before practice, he’s down there with the coaches watching film or listening to game plans.”

The Arkansas quarterback room in those days was tight. Loggains, despite his limited playing time, became a central figure in a group that featured future SMU head coach Rhett Lashlee and future NFL signal-callers Matt Jones and Tavaris Jackson.

Loggains, too, was the trickster of the bunch.

Former Razorbacks quarterback Ryan Sorohon recalled the stringent rules about always having his 150-page playbook handy. If you lost it, the punishment usually involved running stadium steps or hours of bear crawls.

During his freshman year, when Sorohan needed to use the restroom, he brought the playbook with him, leaving it on the sink counter briefly. When he returned, it was gone.

Loggains had swiped the playbook and hidden it. Sorohon, embarrassed at losing it, had to return to the quarterback room empty-handed.

“All along it was Dowell just playing a little prank on me,” he said.

“He doesn’t take himself too seriously,” added Lashlee. ”But, at the same time, he’s really, really smart. He was a quarterback. He thinks the game like a quarterback, which I think most good play-callers do.”

Growing in Nashville and a meteoric rise in pro football

Loggains, like Beamer, oozes charisma.

He’s self-deprecating and charming, wholly aware of his small frame and the funny looks he gets alongside monstrous football players. He’s also a whiz with a marker in his hand, explaining the intricacies of the quarterback position through a 20-minute diatribe on how he decides to offer certain signal-caller recruits.

This, the fun-loving guy’s guy doubling as a mad scientist, is what has endeared Loggains to so many in football circles.

“You’ve got to find leaders who can pull everybody together, because there’s a chance you’re gonna walk in the locker room and there’s going to be eight new starters from the portal. You have to somehow figure out how to turn them into a unit and a team,” said longtime NFL assistant Clyde Christensen, who worked with Loggains in Miami. “I think Shane has that ability, which is why he’ll pass an awful lot of people. And I think Dowell is the same way.”

That Loggains found an easy camaraderie with those in the NFL comes to little surprise. The somewhat stubborn yet driven nature that had him sitting in on coaches meetings at Arkansas before his playing days ended carried into his time as a low-level assistant coach in Dallas and Tennessee.

He bonded quickly with former Mississippi State head coach Sylvester Croom, who hired Beamer to his first full-time position coaching gig in 2004 and was consulted on Loggains’ hiring at South Carolina.

Loggains, then the Titans offensive coordinator, took Croom around Nashville when he first visited with the team, before Croom landed on staff as a running backs coach shortly thereafter. They’ve remained close since.

“Any time you’re hiring people in those positions (like offensive coordinator) the first thing I always want to know about — and I’m sure Shane is the same — is what kind of working relationship are we gonna have?” Croom told The State. “You want a guy to be creative. You want a guy to be in a position where he can express himself, but, in the end, make good decisions as well. … And in my working relationship with Dowell, he has done that.”

That same comfort Croom felt came in Loggains’ relationship with Titans quarterback Kerry Collins who, in Loggains’ first year as the Titans quarterbacks coach in 2010, was eight years his senior.

There was no hesitation or awkwardness between the two despite their age difference. They built a mutual respect based on long days in the film room. Loggains, inevitably, became one of Collins’ closest confidants.

“When you’re around people who know what they’re talking about, it doesn’t matter what their experiences are, how old they are,” Collins said. “That’s the way I looked at it. He was great in the film room. He was great from a game-planning standpoint and someone that I could trust with what we talked about in the meeting room.”

How Loggains fits at South Carolina

John Fox sighs thinking back to the 2016 season.

His second campaign as head coach in Chicago is only seven years behind. But there’s still a sour taste.

Blame shaky front-office moves, bad injury luck, or whatever it might have been. The Bears never came close to the championship-caliber team those around the squad hoped for when Fox landed with the organization the year prior.

Yet, sandwiched in the middle of a 3-13 second season in which the Bears lost starting quarterback Jay Cutler and were forced to lean on backups Brian Hoyer and Matt Barkley, Fox came away impressed with Loggains amid less-than-ideal circumstances.

“People are gonna highlight past stats and that kind of stuff,” Fox told The State. “I would say they could look at it and kind of make that skewed. But when you see the people he’s been around — coaches and players — that definitely speak highly of him, that’s kind of more worthwhile, in my opinion, to look at as an evaluation.”

This, at least in part, is the narrative that followed Loggains throughout his NFL tenure. He’s a whiz that was largely burdened by up-and-down quarterback situations or rosters that weren’t equipped to win.

No unit Loggains coached finished better than 15th of 32 teams in the league in yards per game, and his teams averaged just 18.5 points per contest. An ESPN article touting him as the lowest-ranked play-caller in the NFL during his time with the New York Jets circulated plenty on social media during the immediate days after his hiring in Columbia.

Sure, coaches are paid handsomely to make it work with the pieces they have. But those close to Loggains insist he’s far more a product of brutal circumstances than his past NFL stops are an indictment on his coaching ability.

“He was a part of some pretty damn good offenses with the Tennessee Titans,” Simms said. “He learned from Kyle Shanahan in Cleveland when he was there. And yeah, they weren’t a great offense. But they were making do with nothing. If they didn’t have Shanahan and Dowell, they would have been one of the worst offenses in football.”

Only time will tell whether Loggains works in Columbia. Spring practice begins this week. He’ll have pieces to work with this season in quarterback Spencer Rattler, receiver Antwane “Juice” Wells Jr. and a crop of veteran returners.

Those who’ve worked alongside Loggains are confident he’ll succeed at South Carolina. Beamer, too, vehemently agrees. Perhaps we owe Loggains the benefit of the doubt.

His inner circle insists as much.