South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer met with the media on Wednesday and spent some time talking about tampering in relation to the Clemson-Ole Miss tampering case.

Beamer backed Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney’s decision to publicly call out tampering and said the penalty for the type of tampering that Swinney alleged should be “severe.”

Beamer isn’t the only SEC coach who weighed in this week on transfer portal tampering in the aftermath of Swinney’s tampering rant and accusations against Ole Miss.

New Kentucky head coach Will Stein also gave his thoughts on the OutKick Hot Mic podcast. He firstly acknowledged there’s a lot of “gray” area in today’s college football landscape, with rampant and unpunished tampering where coaches contact players while not in the transfer portal, often driven by NIL inducements.

“There’s a lot of gray – mostly gray, just to be quite frank,” Stein said. “And I think you have to do your best job as a coach operating within the confines of the rules. You have to. I mean, that’s why rules are in place. But the rules get skewed. They get changed. They change almost weekly, daily sometimes, yearly. So, it’s like, how do you keep up with this? You have to have really smart people around you, and you have to do the right thing. It’s really simple.”

Stein went on to blast Ole Miss head coach Pete Golding over the alleged tampering, saying “it’s not that hard” to keep from cheating and follow the rules.

As you know, during his press conference on Jan. 23, Swinney criticized Golding for allegedly luring linebacker Luke Ferrelli into the transfer portal. Swinney claims that Golding texted Ferrelli directly while he was sitting in class after having already enrolled at Clemson. Ferrelli had already signed his financial aid agreement and was taking part in football activities before ultimately re-entering the portal and committing to the Rebels on Jan. 22.

“Don’t text a kid” who’s on another team’s roster, Stein says, adding “it’s not that hard.”

“You can’t text or call guys. You can’t do that, so don’t do it. It’s not that hard,” Stein said. “I don’t understand why it can be so difficult for coaches, and that’s the rules, and that’s what Dabo said. If that’s the rule, then follow the rule. And if there is no rule, then it’s our job just as coaches in-game, like bending rules … everybody is bending it like that. So, until they establish a clear, concise rules and get the calendar fixed to where people don’t have to do this, it’s going to happen.

“I mean, it’s going to happen. So, play within the rules. … Don’t text a kid. I mean, it’s not that hard. I don’t get that. It’s not hard.”