Georgia fans apparently aren’t the only ones who cringe when somebody mentions "Tyler Simmons was onside."

Almost six years later, apparently, South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer has flashbacks, too.

“Y’all are going to take me down a nightmare,” Beamer joked with reporters after the subject came up during his Tuesday press conference to preview Saturday’s game against the top-ranked Bulldogs (3:30 p.m., CBS).

Beamer, who served for two seasons as Georgia’s tight ends and special teams coach under Kirby Smart, admits he still feels a certain amount of pain whenever he thinks back to what most believe was a missed call that perhaps cost the Bulldogs the 2017 national championship.

“You ask anybody in Athens what ‘Tyler Simmons was onside’ means, they know because of the national championship game we had against Alabama,” Beamer recalled. “Kirby had come up with a plan that when Alabama punts, 'We're confident they're going to do this and when they do this, we're going to do that.'"

Beamer recalled what happened next.

“We knew that if Alabama was in that protection scheme, we were going to get a free rusher. We did, came completely clean, and blocked the punt, just like we had designed it to do,” Beamer said. “Unfortunately, the officiating crew–not an SEC crew–absolutely blew the call. I don’t want to say that cost us the national championship, but that was a significant play in the game.”

Smart was asked about the play and Beamer’s comment during his post-practice media session Tuesday.

"I mean, I was over it after it happened because I just assumed that, you know, they made the call that they saw and they felt confident about. But in all reality it should've come back anyway because they had people moving before the snap,” Smart said. “So it wasn't about whether he was onside or not — the movement pre-snap should've negated the play. It's something we work hard on."

Beamer’s relationship with Smart and his two seasons in Athens were discussed at length during Tuesday’s press conference.

“I’ve got a lot of respect for Coach Smart,” said Beamer, noting the two seasons he spent in Athens may have been the most impactful of his coaching career.

“I’ve worked with some great coaches, Steve Spurrier, my dad (Frank Beamer), Philip Fulmer, George O’Leary, Sylvester Croom,” Beamer said. “But those two years were just extremely impactful for me growing as a coach, just being around Kirby, who was a first-time head coach. When I got the job here, I brought a lot of those lessons I learned here.”

Beamer employs many of those lessons today.

“When you’re in that building (at Georgia) there wasn’t going to be a wasted moment while you were working,” Beamer said. “There was an urgency to the way they do things in practice. We’re very similar in a lot of ways that we practice every year, so there’s a lot of things to be honest, that we’ve taken when I got hired here.”

Being that Beamer served as the Bulldogs’ special teams coach in addition to his duties mentoring Georgia’s tight ends, the two coaches spent a lot of time together making sure they were in lockstep in regard to plans for each week’s game.

“A lot of coaches are kind of like, you do what you want, just tell me what you’re doing, and I’ll see you on the practice field,” Beamer said of his special teams role. “But if you know Kirby, he’s got his hands on everything. So, I would come up with my initial thoughts, and when we were together on Monday mornings, we’d sit there for an hour-plus game planning what we wanted to do special teams-wise.”

Beamer said the relationship was a great one.

“I would say it was a collaboration. He was the head coach, so I was going to do what he wanted to do, but I knew he trusted me with putting the initial plan together as far as things we were trying to do each week,” Beamer said. “I remember we were getting ready to play Auburn, and whoever we had played the previous week, I think it was South Carolina, he literally as soon as the game was over, came up to me and said, 'We’re doing that next week against Auburn when they punt, I want this to happen, just make sure you get this coached up and ready to go for Monday.'

"I said OK, and he was right. What we did was pretty good from a schematic scheme, but he had an idea going back to his time at Alabama of what he wanted."