Scott Davis: Gamecocks ready to run?

Scott Davis has followed South Carolina athletics for over 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly newsletter year-round and a column during football season that’s published each Monday on GamecockCentral.com.

Following is this week’s Scott Davis newsletter. To receive it each Friday, sign up here.

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Whatever you’re wondering about when it comes to South Carolina’s preparations for the 2024 football season, head coach Shane Beamer has probably already addressed it as he’s made his way across the state during the annual Welcome Home tour.

He’s touched on the Transfer Portal. He’s talked about the healthy competition in South Carolina’s wide receiver room. He’s chatted about presumptive starting quarterback LaNorris Sellers, about the newcomers who’ve excited him the most, about the first-year coaches who joined the staff over the winter.

And he’s also spoken about the one thing most fans had hoped never to speak of again.

He’s acknowledged the dark and disturbing downward trend for the South Carolina running game.

“At the end of the day, we need to be able to run the ball more effectively than what we have,” Beamer said at an event in Spartanburg. “Not just last year, but since I’ve been the head coach.”

Indeed, there’s no real way to make the numbers look pretty. South Carolina finished dead last in the SEC in rushing the football in 2023, both in total rushing yards and in yards per attempt. The Gamecocks mustered a meager 85 yards per game on the ground last season, for an astonishing 2.77 yards per rush. Those are not the kinds of stats you’d want to include on your resume.

In case you’re wondering what this all means – yes, Vanderbilt rushed the football more effectively than did South Carolina in 2023. Georgia, Tennessee and LSU amassed two-and-a-half times more rushing yards than the Gamecocks did last year. But if anything, the eye-opening numbers don’t quite accurately tell the story of just how terrifying it felt to watch South Carolina run the football a season ago.

If this team needed a yard, you hoped to see them drop back to pass.

And for the Gamecock offense to have any hope of changing its fortunes in 2024, all of this must improve.

I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, of course. But no matter how much we talk about it, and no matter how much we may wish we could talk about something else, it stubbornly and consistently remains Topic #1 for this program.

Until something changes.

Wide Receiver U?

While it has rarely felt to most lifelong Gamecock fans that the South Carolina offense represented a high-flying, speed-racing machine, the reality is that the program has quietly churned out quality wide receivers across the last few decades.

Ex-Gamecock wideouts have dotted NFL rosters for years now, going back to the days of Sterling Sharpe and Robert Brooks, on through the players of more recent vintage like Troy Williamson, Sidney Rice, Alshon Jeffery, Pharoh Cooper and Deebo Samuel. Even the forgettable Will Muschamp years produced a signature receiver in Bryan Edwards.

That legacy is why it wasn’t at all surprising that the one South Carolina player to be selected in the first round of this year’s NFL Draft was a receiver – Xavier Legette.

And yet, despite the program’s success in putting elite athletes on the field at receiver over the years, it hasn’t always guaranteed offensive achievement. Here’s an interesting factoid: When South Carolina has been competitive in the SEC, the team has almost always had a potent running game.

It’s hard to remember this now, but Steve Spurrier’s program was posting 7-win seasons and appearing in second-tier bowl games until 2010, which also happened to be the year that everything changed for the Gamecock running game.

That’s when the staff began to incorporate zone read schemes into the rushing attack, and when a back by the name of Marcus Lattimore began stockpiling yards. The result was an appearance in the SEC Championship.

Even when Lattimore’s career was cut short by injuries, effective pile-pushers like Kenny Miles, Brandon Wilds and eventually Mike Davis stepped in to fill the void. Meanwhile, once Connor Shaw took the reins at quarterback, the team became a threat to accumulate rushing yards from the QB position, too.

Those years – perhaps not coincidentally – represented the high-water mark for South Carolina football. But in recent seasons, the ground game has been stuck in neutral, and occasionally in reverse.

How do we get it unstuck?

Finding a Fix

It’s worth remembering that South Carolina’s sole recipient of the Heisman Trophy was a running back. That statue you’ll find outside Williams-Brice Stadium is of George Rogers.

So yes, it can happen here.

But right now, it isn’t happening here. And it hasn’t for a while: Taking a look at the numbers reveals the ugly truth that South Carolina struggled to run the football for much of Will Muschamp’s tenure in Columbia, too.

The question is why. Is it a lack of elite athletes at the position? Is it a lack of creativity in offensive scheming? Or could it be something else, something that has remained a consistent source of consternation since South Carolina joined the SEC more than 30 years ago?

It’s no secret among both Gamecock fans and the national college football media that South Carolina has struggled with offensive line play for a significant portion of the university’s three-plus decades in the SEC. Intermittently, the O-line has delivered solid results and contributed to winning seasons. When the Gamecocks have been good over the last 30 years, they’ve always had an imposing offensive line.

When they haven’t? Well, you know the story.

Going back to at least the early ‘90s – back when Shane Beamer was still roaming the halls of Blacksburg High School – the South Carolina O-line’s ongoing issues have been a source of bewilderment, frustration and outright grief for Gamecock fans. As a result, anytime the team finds it difficult to move the football forward a yard or two, that’s the place many fans will look first.

One way or the other, as Year Four of the Beamer Era looms, South Carolina’s hopes for returning to winning seasons and bowl game appearances rest in one place.

On the ground.

Tell me what you think about the chances for improvement in the South Carolina running game by writing me at [email protected].

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