Welcome to talking season. SEC Media Days is underway in Tampa, where 16 head coaches, dozens of players and roughly 1,000 media members will spend the next four days discussing everything from championship expectations to quarterback battles and College Football Playoff expansion. We’ll update this tracker throughout the week with the biggest news, notable quotes and key takeaways from every coach who steps to the podium.
Clark Lea, Vanderbilt
Clark Lea kicked off the afternoon session by saying, “Progress is not the destination. We’re not finished.”
Lea is at the most disrespected program in the conference. You can tell that doesn’t seem to faze him at all. Lea knows that he’s in an uphill battle at a program like Vanderbilt, but the turnaround he’s achieved in his short time there has been awesome.
The thing that you get from Lea more than anything else is authenticity and gratefulness. In a time where coaches are fired after three and sometimes even two years, he was given a longer runway to get this thing off the ground. That is one of the many reasons he gave so much praise to the people in the Vanderbilt administration.
He was asked about his athletic director Candice Storey Lee, and jokingly said he could talk about her for the entirety of his time on stage. He wasn’t kidding.
The story for Vanderbilt this year will be much different than the one from a season ago. Lea mentioned that, and said that no one knows how good this team will be. They’ll decide that by the choices they make on and off the field, starting with fall practice in the coming weeks.
In summation, some elite coach speak there.
Shane Beamer, South Carolina
Shane Beamer closed out the afternoon session with a very long opening statement before it was opened to questions. It felt like it was much more of a reminder to everyone that South Carolina this year isn’t the same South Carolina from last year.
A 4-8 season is never something to write home about and will not be celebrated. But, even in the depths of that disappointing season, he was still able to be successful in a lot of key areas.
He brought up the retention and the culture that’s been in place there. That’s not only evident in the retention of key players from last year’s squad, but in the fact that all three players he brought to Tampa to talk at media days were entering their fourth year in the South Carolina program.
That’s extremely rare in this day and age of the transfer portal. He also mentioned that despite the record they signed the highest ranked recruiting class in per player rankings in the history of the program.
South Carolina has struggled, at times, under Beamer, and he absolutely deserves to be on the hot seat right now. I’m sure he would tell you the same. But, you got the feeling from the way he presented himself on stage that he might not just coach his way off of it this season, he might have this team winning way more than people expect.
This is the most talented team that Beamer has had at South Carolina. They have five of the top 11 recruits in program history on this year’s team. They also have multiple potential first round picks on both sides of the ball.
“We won’t be picked very high, which I get. I really like this team. A lot of guys are still here from 2024 when we were two points away from making the CFP,” said Beamer. “We have the No. 2 graduation success rate in the SEC for football. The culture is in place. Recruiting is going well. We are far from done.”
Maybe the best thing he brought up during his 30 minutes in the main room was a shout out to former Gamecock QB Stephen Garcia, who is from Tampa and currently battling cancer. Garcia finished his sixth round of chemo this morning, and then traveled over to the JW Marriott to meet with the players and Beamer while in town.
Again, the results may not have been great every year with Beamer, but the culture he’s created has been constant.
Kirby Smart, Georgia
The longest tenured coach in the SEC started the day on Tuesday. Kirby Smart’s annual address to the media was a copy and paste from previous seasons and just as enjoyable as ever.
He brought up the offseason, his admiration for Greg Sankey and praised other successes from the UGA athletic department. He even updated this year’s team motto, which he adapted from the OKC Thunder about “being uncommon.”
One media member called Georgia’s wide receiver room the team’s biggest question mark. Smart smiled and replied, “I appreciate people like you in the media continuing to question them.”
He also brought up one of the things that Georgia has done better than almost anyone in the country over the last several years: continuity. Not only has Georgia done a better job at player retention than any other team in the country, but the continuity on staff, especially in this era, has been elite.
Smart pointed out that they’ve had almost the exact same staff for the last three to four years across the board. They even have four coaches on staff that have been with Smart for nine or more years.
What stood out the most was his reminder to everyone about who Georgia is, and always will be, despite the constant changes around him. When asked about the ever-changing landscape of college football he said plain and simply that a lot has changed but “what wins football games has not changed.”
