Reflecting on the impact penalties had on South Carolina's loss to LSU

As the ball soared into the air, it looked like it had a chance to sneak in. It was going to be close, but with how Alex Herrera had been kicking up to that point, it was possible. 

But as the ball started to come down, it began to tail left and barely missed going through the uprights. Looking up at the scoreboard, there were three zeroes on the clock. That was it. Ballgame. 

Even if Herrera’s 49-yard field goal was good, it would’ve only tied the game and sent it to overtime. Instead, South Carolina was on the wrong end of a 36-33 loss to No. 16 LSU on Saturday. And it shouldn’t have had to come down to a do-or-die kick on the final play.

The Gamecocks jumped out to a commanding 17-0 lead and looked on the verge of slamming the door on the Tigers but couldn’t do so. They had some critical turnovers, which kept the game close. And they also missed some key tackles that turned into big chunk plays.

Another constant throughout the game was penalties, and there were a lot of them. South Carolina was flagged 13 times for 123 total yards. In the first two games combined, the team committed an equal amount of penalties — five in Week 1 and eight in Week 2. Fair calls or not, it had a big impact on the outcome. 

“Those things are detrimental, definitely in SEC play,” Robby Ashford said. “… When we’re playing a great team like LSU, you can’t have those mistakes. We learned that you can’t have those mistakes on both sides of the ball.”

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The officials were often throwing flags on both sides. LSU had nine penalties of its own, racking up 75 yards. But the times at which the Tigers’ penalties came were not nearly as detrimental as they were in South Carolina’s case.

Only minutes into the game, the Gamecock defense was already swarming LSU quarterback Garrett Nussmeier with heavy pressure. It led to Nussmeier overthrowing a receiver and right into the hands of O’Donnell Fortune for a South Carolina pick six. But as Nussmeier readied to throw, Kyle Kennard got a hand on him and tugged his jersey, resulting in a horse collar tackle penalty. This wiped the play out and gave the Tigers back the football. 

Much later in the game, with South Carolina now leading 33-29 in the fourth quarter, Nussmeier threw another interception, this time right to Nick Emmanwori in the end zone and took it the other for a 100-yard pick six. On the play, though, Kennard put two hands on Nussmeier and knocked him down. 

The fifth-year EDGE put his hands in the air to show he was innocent. But the officials didn’t see it that way and flagged him again to take six more points off the board. The Gamecocks would’ve led by double-digits with just under six minutes remaining. 

“It’s just like, it’s hard to get that back,” Debo Williams said. “That’s points off the board, that’s 14 points off the board right there off of two pick sixes.”

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While flags came against Kennard on two of the biggest plays in the game, it wasn’t all his fault. South Carolina had multiple of the same penalties including ineligible receiver downfield, offensive pass interference and false starts. Defensively, it racked up three pass interference and two offsides penalties. 

“Man, it sucks. I don’t think as a team we’ve ever been penalized like this,” Emmanwori said. “I’ve never seen a game where we’ve been so penalized. 13 is crazy. That’s like one flag away from winning the game and it just sucks. It’s just a bad feeling.”

From an offensive standpoint, the penalties hurt the momentum of putting together good drives. On the series before Emmanwori’s pick six, the Gamecocks had just moved into LSU territory on a 43-yard pass play from Ashford to Dalevon Campbell. But offensive pass interference was called on Mazeo Bennett, even though there was nothing evident that looked like it could warrant a penalty. 

On the final drive of the game, South Carolina was on the other side of the field once again and looked to be in a good position to either tie or take the lead. However, the Gamecocks had a false start with 35 seconds to go. It pushed them back five yards only a few plays before Herrera would attempt his last-second field goal. 

“Some calls were definitely iffy, like the one up to D Camp. Mazeo was running a route and (the officials) said he was blocking and that took away maybe a 40-yard gain,” Ashford said. “Those kill drives because we had so much momentum then it gets called back.”

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There’s an argument that South Carolina should be 3-0 right now with a good chance to remain unbeaten facing Akron next Saturday. Instead, the team must now figure out how to cut down on those costly mistakes. 

“Like we always do, we try and educate our guys on them and just be smarter. A lot of them can just come from getting lined up the right way and executing — that starts with us as coaches,” head coach Shane Beamer said.

“Some of those were RPO type plays that the quarterback scrambled and then you’re going to have linemen blocking downfield on some of those. But got to go back and go back and look at it and obviously do even more of a job of emphasizing it. We’ve been pretty good around here about penalties and not having a lot of them, and we weren’t (on Saturday).”

Likewise, the players expect to be better. They know they must be. And they believe they will. 

“There’s things we can clean up and thankfully that wasn’t our last game of the season,” Ashford said. “So, we’re going to get in there and clean it up and just try not to make the same mistakes and just get better overall as a unit and just as an offense.”

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