Everything South Carolina receivers coach Mike Furrey said about spring ball

South Carolina wide receivers coach Mike Furrey spoke to the media Tuesday, providing insight on the Gamecocks returnees in his position group and the talented class of incoming freshmen.

Below is a transcript of what Furrey had to say, only edited for brevity in some cases.

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Impressions of the Group So Far

It’s exciting. It’s a bunch of new faces, and then you’ve got some guys that are returning from last year that have gained a lot of experience, whether playing or practicing the way we want to execute. What we demand on a daily basis—it’s exciting because you have a lot of new faces that are going really hard. You’ve got a lot of guys coming back who understand how to play the game the right way, and it’s a good combination.

What Freshmen Need to Learn During Spring Ball

I think we recruited every single one of them because of their talent, right? The first thing that always happens is things slow down. A lot of thinking goes on, and their skill set and talent don’t show right away. A lot of that’s just becoming comfortable. We’ve challenged these guys a lot over the last six weeks to understand what their assignments are, how to get lined up, and then execute and perform the details we’re asking them to do in terms of the routes we’re asking them to run.

When you look at it collectively, all of them have taken a deep breath over the last six weeks. They’ve all gotten in. Coach Day does a phenomenal job in our weight program to get guys acclimated because it’s rigorous, demanding, and structured—kind of like playing the game. They’ve all responded very well to that, and that’s helped them be ready for spring ball. What these guys have shown over the first three days has been very impressive.

Incorporating More Passing into the Offense

I think it’s really just analyzing your talent, seeing what you have. Last year we had a heck of a running back in Rocket (Sanders). In the beginning of the season, everybody was trying to figure out what kind of quarterback LaNorris (Sellers) was going to be. We didn’t have any weapons on the outside that had proven themselves. The guy who was probably the most consistent in production was Rocket Sanders. What we asked him to do, especially early on last year, helped us win a lot of football games.

Now, when you look at the whole picture of the returning guys with experience now—Mazeo (Bennett), Nyck Harbor, Jared Brown, and Vandrevius Jacobs—they’re completely different players now. That’s part of the excitement. They’re completely different players. Then you bring in the talent of the young guys who can run and are super talented. Now you’re not going to have to be so one-dimensional. Collectively as an entire offense, you better be able to defend everything. I think that’s the best part about an offense that you want to design, and I think we’re in that situation hopefully by the end of spring.

On Nyck Harbor’s improvement

I think the biggest thing is maturity, right? And, without getting too much into it, and Nyck can speak a lot about it on his own when he talks to you guys. But I think when you look at a Nyck Harbor, I think everybody’s expectations for Nyck exceeded what his expectations were because he was so inexperienced at playing the position.

Well, there’s a lot that goes on to play wide out. It’s not just running. You’ve got to run as fast as you can. You’ve got to get in and out of transitions. You’ve got to be able to snap your head around. You’ve got to be able to catch the ball when it’s in flight. You’ve got to be able to catch that ball while you’re running 100 miles an hour at that ball. There’s a lot that goes on. And he just hasn’t, he hadn’t at that time really experienced a lot of that stuff. Right. It was all just speculation.

And I think now the biggest thing for Nyck that we’re all excited about, including himself, is he’s caught balls in games. He’s went and got footballs. We relied on him on some pass stuff last year. I think towards the end of the season, the touchdown against Missouri, I think it was, or the ball he caught over the shoulder against Missouri. And then touchdown coming back against Akron or whatnot and kind of starting to get in the flow of things. That builds confidence.

I think the more and more he becomes confident with himself, the more and more we’ll start exceeding our expectations of what we think Nyck Harbor. And I think the other thing too for Nyck, I think the best thing about Nyck is, I told Nyck this the other day, the best thing that ever could happen to Nyck is these six freshmen that are coming in. Because they’re going to come in here and just do everything they can and do it right and do it as fast as they can.

And he’s going to be able to learn from them a little bit too of how you’re supposed to do stuff and see it the right way. And then be able to go out and emulate that also and add that to his game. So it’s kind of hand in hand with him coming back with experience and then the new guys coming in that are going to be able to push him. And he’s had three really good days here this spring.

Conversations with Jordon and Donovan

Yeah, well the biggest thing was we let that happen on its own, right? We didn’t force any of that. We didn’t want to do anything where we ruined any relationship with any high school coaches taking a kid from their senior year and that they were relying on playing.

So both of those situations was family driven. It was their personal decision. And then we said, well if that were the case, then obviously then what we’ll do is start looking into it and then we’ll start providing, obviously the details of what that looks like and how we can get that done and how we can help you get that done.

Both of them, when you look at them, they belong in college, right? Their physicality, their size, their speed, their body type. You just really don’t see a lot of kids like that in college, let alone going to be seniors in high school. And so both of them physically were ready to play or at least ready to get to college.

I think when you look at all their production in high school, especially when you look at Murph’s situation, obviously AJ was there and they had a heck of a career, his senior year, AJ’s senior year. They go to the state championship game. There’s a lot of things that Murph accomplished, being all state and getting invited to the Under Armour game. There are a lot of things he’s already accomplished. Right? So really like what’s next when you look at those things.

And we thought they were both ready to play so we continued to pursue it and flipped them over to be obviously early enrollees who graduate early. We’re excited now that Jordon’s here, which is even crazier to think that he really should be in the spring of his junior year. But it’s awesome that he’s here now and it’ll be great in May when Murph shows up.

Next Steps for Mazeo Bennett

Yeah, I’ll tell you what. I think when you look at our group, the guy in our room that has made the biggest strides physically — and a lot of it has to do with just his body maturing — is Mazeo Bennett.

I think when you look at Mazeo, his (testing) numbers are all down, his speed, his quickness his shiftiness. Mazeo is a really, really smart player. I think one of the kryptonites to Mazeo was that he was so passionate about the game that he became so emotionally attached to failure or not being able to do stuff. A lot of that stuff would catch up to him last year because he knew he could do it and he wanted to do it, but he just wasn’t doing it yet. It’s a transition period, right?

But that young man has taken our tips of what we wanted him to accomplish this offseason. Mazeo Bennett ran some routes today that Mazeo Bennett wouldn’t do last year at this time. What he’s doing now is what a lot of people can’t do. And it’s impressive.

That was the biggest challenge to him was getting his body right. Trimming up, losing some of the baby sense that he has, you know, that kids have when they come in while they’re still mature and put on some muscle mass and get faster and have more confidence in his speed. He’s done that.

So he’s been really, really impressive over the last three days. I don’t tell him I said that because he’s an emotional, he rides that emotion, right, a little bit. But, Mazeo is a special player. I know this place means a lot to him too because of being down the road. That’s why he came here, right? I mean, South Carolina kid. He wanted to be at South Carolina. He loves South Carolina. And he wanted to do so much his freshmen year for South Carolina and a lot of those things don’t happen just for lack of experience, right? You got to grow a little bit. And so what he’s done over the last six, seven weeks has been really impressive.

Progress of Jared Brown

Yeah, it’s again, I believe he’s… Jared is a super, super talented guy that he just wants to do everything. He’s a big pleaser, right? He wants to do everything the right way.

When you come from Coastal to South Carolina last year, he would tell you this too. I don’t think his game was really devoted to being an outside wideout. It was always the knickknack stuff and being used as a gadget type of guy. Sometimes you can get stuck with that, right? All of a sudden when you go somewhere, it’s like, can you really become a wideout? But are you just a gadget guy? Gadget guys are hard to play now because every time you go in the game, everybody knows you’re running some type of gadget with them. You know, it’s a bubble screen or an option or something like that he did at his previous school.

So our challenge to Jared Brown this offseason was to develop as a wideout, right? Develop your releases, develop your stems, work on your transitions, understand how to get the catch points, just not rely on your talent because you’re super talented. And don’t rely on just the fact that you’re a gadget player. Jared Brown has the ability and the skillset to be a really, really good wide receiver.

That was kind of our focus this offseason. He’s done a really good job working on it. What he’s done really over the last two or three days actually, I just was watching film before I came in here, some of the routes that he’s learned to the run from day one to day three, you can see a natural route runner in there. That all continues to grow, right, throughout spring. So again, I’ve been impressed with him also.

So, when you look at those three guys and Vandrevius Jacobs, who come from Florida State, kind of just really trying to figure out a role. Super, super talented, just not very consistent. That’s something that he wanted to work on was become more reliable and trustworthy and he’s learned a lot of that stuff also over the last six, seven weeks.

So again, it’s an exciting group that’s coming back with those four guys outside of the other couple of guys that are in there and, put the mix of the young guys in there. It’s a pretty cool competitive, quietly competitive room because they all know they can play ball. That’ll make our room better.

Not Taking a Wide Receiver from the Portal

It’s a lot of conversations went into that, going into the offseason. Obviously, when the portal opened and everybody started getting in the portal, we had to look at it just to kind of see the guys that were getting in.

Obviously, the other thing, too, to be honest with you, you come off the season that we had and you’ve got the quarterback that we have. There are a lot of people that were interested in coming to South Carolina that we really needed to probably take a look at to make our team better.

The more and more that we did that, the conversations obviously led by Coach Beamer, the conversations were, we didn’t want to take away from the guys that are coming back that we knew have developed. We knew we had the six wideouts coming in, so we didn’t want to bring in somebody that was going to take reps away from them that would allow them to grow.

But at the same time, we didn’t want to miss on something maybe that a kid that wanted to be here in South Carolina, wanted to come here and help this football team win. It was really, really important for him to be here and be part of this offense.

There were a lot of boxes that were really just outside of talent. A lot of those guys get in the portal, they’re very talented. But at the same time, your characteristics and your mindset and your goals have to kind of align with what our goals are as a program.

The more and more we kind of did that, it would have been okay to grab a guy that maybe had one year left. Obviously, it would have been good for experience in the room. But at the same time, was your mission to come here and help South Carolina win a lot of football games, or are you doing it selfishly? There were a lot of things that we had to make sure we protected our program from.

In the end, it was just stick with what we believed we had coming back. It’s my job as a wide receiver coach to develop the guys coming back. We had enough trust in the guys coming in. I told Coach Beamer, it’s my job to make sure these young freshmen are where we want them to be. That’s why we recruited them. So we ended up making that decision that we weren’t going to bring anybody in to enter that room.

Developing Skills of Incoming Players

You really just hit the nail on the head there. When you speak about it, you have to identify their strengths. You’ve got to put them in positions to allow their strengths to take over and not give them too much. There are guys here that are really, really smart football players. They’re savvy. They have a really good understanding. We can move them around to some multiple positions.

Some guys are more just, let me just lock in and do my job and feel comfortable so I can go out and just play. So we kind of identified them and leave them at one position for right now so they can get their feet underneath them.

The biggest thing was to identify their strengths. They all have a lot of things in common. They all have the ball skills. They have the big catch radius. I would say that all of them can run pretty good. Every one of them can run pretty good. Y

You know, Brian Rowe’s, pretty explosive. Then you look at a 41-inch vert, I think he had maybe this past two weeks ago. Lex Cyrus gets in there and breaks the school record for vertical, not having stepped on the field yet. You start talking about the short area quickness compared to like a Nyck Harbor where it’s like hey let’s get Nyck on the run a little bit but those guys can just line up and you can’t catch them.

Just identifying their skill sets, you add Murph into this category here coming up in May, it will be fun to kind of see how they all play out with each other and how they all line up.

When you walk off the practice field, you kind of got to go to your office right away so you can go watch these guys run around a little bit. It’s pretty impressive and it’s a lot of fun. There’s a lot of coaching and a lot of teaching that still has to be done. At the same time, I think the word talented is going to be mentioned a lot with that group. They’re super talented. Obviously, that’s why we wanted them here and why we worked our tails off to get them all here. They so far have checked that box.

A lot of work left. These kids, they’re still kids. Like you said, two of them should still be juniors in high school and four of them should still be high school seniors going to prom here in a couple of weeks. At the same time, maturity, right? Some of them are a little more mature than others. Some still think they can do something they can’t do yet because they just haven’t experienced it.

Some guys have shocked you. Some guys have come here with the mentality that I didn’t think they kind of had, maybe a little bit but just didn’t see it consistently, then all of a sudden you get out there in practice… and it’s kind of like, I texted one of the coaches yesterday, he’s a completely different player mentally than I expected. Not that it was bad. I didn’t think he would be as alert and focused and locked in on a daily basis. But it’s been neat.

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