COLUMBIA — This could have hit the boiling point a week ago. Perhaps it should have, as no matter what, last week’s game hosting Vanderbilt was the third game and thus the quarter-mile of the season.
South Carolina’s offense is horrendous. It is predictable, stale and worst of all, non-productive. Even though Shane Beamer is of the opinion that stats always even out over the course of a season and coordinator Mike Shula knows his offense can work while acknowledging that it can be difficult waiting for that to happen, the numbers are stark.
USC is last in the SEC in rushing offense. It is 15th in scoring offense. It is 14th in passing offense. It has scored a mere five touchdowns.
“Total” offense in the SEC?
Last.
Those tallies are way past “not good enough,” and you don’t need a hearing aid to listen to the outrage from USC’s fan base. Expectations are always fluid, but visions of a College Football Playoff season are circling the drain.
Beamer embraced those expectations as well and is now seeing them hover above his head. Because if the offense doesn’t work this week, win or lose, a third of the season is gone and Beamer as head man is going to have to ask himself if he’s done everything he can to fix the problem.
“Every week, that’s just what you sign up for. When you don’t play well, you don’t perform well, head coach gets the blame, and then the offensive coordinator or defensive coordinator get the blame. And as the head coach, it’s my job to take a step back and make sure we’re coaching it the right way, calling the right things,” he said. “I mean, we only get 12 of these guaranteed, so there’s not a lot of patience that you have when things aren’t going well to just say, ‘Well, you know, hopefully by November, we kick into gear.’”
It was the biggest issue going into last week’s game. It would have been the major topic after Vanderbilt, win or lose, but then LaNorris Sellers got hurt.
All questions on the offense had to be tabled. No offense is going to run well without its starting quarterback, and USC’s was no exception. Once Sellers went out just before halftime, the Gamecocks were able to move the ball in spurts, but they never found the end zone.
Naturally, it could have carried over to this week if Sellers didn’t recover from his malady in time to play at No. 23 Missouri. But reports throughout the week have him tracking to play, so the numbers come back into view, as well as the new line.
Vanderbilt may go on to have an outstanding season, but the Commodores running over the Gamecocks 31-7 at Williams-Brice Stadium leaped well over “QB got hurt.” Two weeks of the offense doing just enough to get by and two wins aided by four special teams/defensive touchdowns bottlenecked into that, creating a firestorm for this week.
Shula is in the center.
“You want every play to score a touchdown. But these teams we’re playing are pretty good as we move forward into continuing to play the SEC. And so there’s a fine line,” Shula said. “And hey, you keep running those plays you work on, you look at other plays. You have plays off those plays … (You) talk to your players about that and keep working on trying to stay out of the negative plays is the main thing. That way you stay on the field, make first downs, and hopefully when you do that, you move the ball and get points.”
Beamer pointed out that last year’s sputtering opener against Old Dominion drew howls from the fans as well as a home stinker against Ole Miss (the Gamecocks managed three points) and a not-great offensive showing at Oklahoma (that one was nearly muted because USC scored two defensive touchdowns and its first offensive TD off another Sooners turnover in a rout of the home team). Even Clemson (just 17 points) had some grumbling.
The Gamecocks won three of those games. They’ve won two of their first three this year when the offense was not clicking.
Those are the biggest questions: Will it click? And when? Or is this as good as it’s going to get?
“You just kind of keep asking your players to be dialed in, to be focused, to keep the blinders on and making sure you do your job. And then if we ask our players to do that, we need to do that as a staff as well,” Shula said. “The culture that Shane has built around here is very important. It’s a tight group of guys that want to play for each other and not let each other down. And I think when you have all those ingredients, I think eventually that stuff’s going to be good.”
The problems seem to be tied to two main areas: The offensive line and how defenses are playing USC. The Ole Miss loss last year featured the Rebels rushing three and dropping eight on most plays, daring Sellers to beat them through the air. If the rushers are able to get home and sack Sellers, so much the better; if not, just contain him so he isn’t able to get a substantial gain with his legs.
This year’s line has given up eight sacks (below last year’s average of 3.2 sacks per game), but the amount of free rushers coming at Sellers and those defenders’ ability to shed the middle of the line to help create the SEC’s worst running game is disturbing. If the line simply can’t block, it’s an issue tied to talent and how that talent is being coached individually.
Yet in the meantime of figuring that out, there is no visible way of trying to work around it — to move the pocket, work the edges, try to get more mid-range receiving routes in play … and letting Sellers do what he does best.
That last part was rebutted by Beamer this week, although it was nothing more than online chatter that started it. “I hear all this crap about, ‘They’re not running the quarterback enough,’ or something. We’re calling the same gol’dang plays we called last year, guys.
“I know there’s like this conspiracy theory going back to the bowl game that we said, ‘Don’t run LaNorris as much.’ We’re running LaNorris plenty.”
Perhaps, but Sellers simply seems hesitant and unsure when he didn’t last year, even in the early season when he had a bad case of the turnovers. Much of that can be traced to not having as much protection in front of him.
“The offensive line a lot of times gets noticed, sometimes for the wrong reasons, or they get noticed when something negative happens,” Shula said. “But there’s a lot of good going on there.”
The first drives against Virginia Tech and Vanderbilt looked marvelous, the Gamecocks marching right down the field and scoring touchdowns. But the entirety of the games after each have been muddled.
Why?
“I think if all of us knew the exact answer to that, we’d all be probably making a lot more money. You can’t just generalize and say, ‘Hey, just this one thing here. It’s one thing there,’” Shula said. “When things are going well, we feel like we’re all doing a good job. If they’re not going well, we feel like we’ve all got to do a better job.”
It’s to the point where some wonder if Beamer has to take that drastic step. Something happened in 2022 to reverse a downhill offensive slide and again in 2023, that time defensively.
This year?
“I meet with (defensive coordinator Clayton White) and Mike on Monday nights, Tuesday nights and Wednesday nights to make sure all three of us are on the same page about what our plan of attack is and what we’re calling, and same thing on special teams,” Beamer said. “Want to know what we’re trying to get done, and then if it’s not getting executed at the level we wanted to get executed at, then you got to look at yourself, myself included, as how you’re presenting it, how you’re teaching it, how you’re coaching it. Is there a way to be better?”