How Dowell Loggains, South Carolina used practice to prepare for play-calling mechanics

When South Carolina’s offense runs onto the field Saturday at Bank of America Stadium for the first time and Dowell Loggains radios down to the play signalers, it’ll be a somewhat new experience for everyone. 

Loggains calling a play at the college level for the first time. And it’s an entirely new mechanics system he’s in trying to make the Gamecocks operate as smoothly as possible. 

And–while South Carolina can rep it as much as possible in practice–the staff won’t truly know how it is until the bullets are flying. 

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“It’s it’s hard because we don’t get a preseason game to go through it and not just with him. He can call plays. He’s called plays before, but it’s just the mechanics of the offensive staff. You’ve got the graduate assistants, you’ve got analysts, you’ve got student assistants. You got backup quarterbacks that are hearing things as well,” Beamer said.

“So there’s just a lot of moving parts on game day that you try and simulate as much as you can in a practice. But until you do it for real and there’s crowd noise and all that as well, it’s it’s tough.”

Loggains isn’t new to the play-calling aspect of it or really even being on a headset during a college game. He was an NFL offensive coordinator for most of his career. And he spent the last two seasons as Arkansas’ tight ends coach where he was on the headsets with coordinator Kendall Briles. 

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Saturday will be the first time, though, he’s at the top of the food chain making the ultimate decision. And in college there suppor staffers tracking different things like personnel groupings, tendencies and plenty of other things and communicating them throughout a game.

If this was the NFL, he’d have at least three preseason games to test out what works and what doesn’t. But Loggains and the Gamecocks don’t get that luxury. 

They jump right into a marquee matchup against North Carolina needing to have the offense clicking as best as they can. So that’s where practice the last month has come into play.  

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“We try to do as much as we can to prepare it. A lot of things that we do in practice we’ll say, ‘Okay, you’ve got 12 plays and we script them.’ Meaning you know the 12 plays before we get out there. But then we’ve done a lot of work in practice where we just I tell them, ‘Hey, we’re just going to put the ball down and just play it like a game.’” 

That gives Loggains and the rest of the staff the chance to really see how the operation works. And get a feel for what game day is going to be like.

“That makes him call plays and practice that way. But it also forces our assistant coaches to be able to get personnel groupings in and out of the out of the game,” Beamer said. “And being able to communicate the play call to the quarterback and all that as well. So trying to do as many things in practice to make it game-like.”

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The Gamecocks also scrimmaged twice at Williams-Brice stadium, almost as a dry run for the operating procedures. Loggains–who will be in the press box to start the season calling plays–was there over the scrimmages too. 

But Saturday night (7:30 p.m., ABC) will be the first time Loggains, Beamer and the rest of the offensive staff do it together with a crowd and with real stakes. 

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“It’ll be the first time he’s ever been on the headphones with me and everyone in an environment like that. But thankfully it’s not his first time calling plays,” Beamer said. “You know, he’s called plays at the highest level in the NFL and big games before also. But it will be new in a lot of ways.”

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