Shane Beamer, Boogie Huntley discuss what's next for South Carolina defensively
Boogie Huntley knew three drives into the game South Carolina’s defense wasn’t playing like it needed to be. So he gathered the entire unit up on the sideline.
The Gamecocks had allowed 14 points and 137 yards on 20 plays, an average of 6.9 yards per play to start the game and Huntley had enough.
At that moment, he spoke about locking in and things quickly changed.
“Just lock in and be the defense we know we are. We weren’t really showing it at the time,” he said. “It’s just one of those things to snap us back in shape. I guess it worked.”
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South Carolina allowed just 84 yards on Furman’s next 30 plays (2.8 yards per play) while giving up no points. Furman scored just one more time–on a short field–while averaging 3.8 yards per play to end the game.
And that’s largely been the story through the first two games of the Gamecocks defensively, some flash paired with some inconsistent play at the same time.
South Carolina’s allowing 26 points per game to start the year while allowing 5.6 yards per play (7.7 yards per pass attempt, 3.9 yards per rush sack-adjusted).
According to Statsowar, the Gamecocks rank No. 73 nationally in defensive success rate at just 35.1 percent. The 35.7 passing success rate against is 95th in the country while the 34.6 defensive success rate against the run is 70th nationally.
South Carolina has forced three turnovers, but there is one glaring thing Huntley and Shane Beamer want to see improve.
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“Just making more explosive plays, really. That’s a big thing we have to do to win games,” Huntley said. “We have to have explosive plays, tackles for loss and sacks. That’s one thing we started at Furman but we still have ways to go in that.”
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Through two games South Carolina has just five tackles for loss and one sack, which came this week against Furman.
The Gamecocks’ havoc rate–which tracks how often a team’s defensive play ends in a tackle for loss, turnover or pass deflection–is just 10.7 percent. Most of that (6.9 percent) is from the secondary with the front seven contributing just 3.8 percent to that.
“I would agree with Boogie. We have to be more disruptive up front. That’s creating negative plays. We’ve talked about it before that it wasn’t good enough–offense or defense–against UNC,” Beamer said. “The discrepancy was the negative play differential between the two offenses. We do need to be more disruptive.”
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The Gamecocks will face arguably the toughest offensive test of the season this weekend while on the road at Georgia, a big mountain to climb for a defense playing a lot of young players.
But despite that, Beamer likes the direction the defense is heading after two games.
“We have some young guys in there. You saw Desmond (Umeozulu) in there last week, you saw Xzavier McLeod. You saw Pup (Howard) and Judge Collier. Jalon Kilgore is starting for us right now. They’re gaining experience. We’ve improved there. We forced some turnovers against UNC. We’ve been good there. We have to continue to force turnovers and limit explosives,” he said.
“We’ve had a solid two games and this will be the best offense we’ve faced this season coming up on Saturday without a doubt because of their weapons everywhere. We have a big challenge this week. I know they’re excited to get out there and perform.”
