The penalties just keep coming. So, what is South Carolina doing to limit them?
It’s been the same song and dance for South Carolina. Despite its best efforts, there’s one constant issue that continues to plague the team game after game.
Penalties haven’t just been a problem for the Gamecocks this season. It’s much worse than that. It’s gotten to a point where the penalties have kept South Carolina from winning at times. Just go back to Week 3 when it committed 13 penalties in a 36-33 loss to LSU.
There isn’t a more penalized team in the SEC than the Gamecocks. They’re currently averaging 8.2 penalties, good for 75.2 yards lost per game.
And now this week, South Carolina is still in the same boat it’s been in all year. The team was flagged eight times for 80 yards in a 27-3 loss to Ole Miss last Saturday. If it hasn’t been fixed by now, when will it ever be?
“The penalties make me sick. But penalties are going to happen,” head coach Shane Beamer said. “It’s the pre-snap penalties that make you want to throw up.”
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Of those eight penalties, five of them came on the defensive side of the ball. Freshman EDGE Dylan Stewart was notably flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct after he pretended to shoot Ole Miss quarterback Jaxson Dart with an imaginary shotgun. The four others were all offsides penalties, all of which came on third down.
The only good news for South Carolina was that those offsides calls didn’t do much damage in the game. But still, it was “very frustrating” for defensive coordinator Clayton White to see the same mistake happen repeatedly.
“To get an offense like Ole Miss into 3rd and 10, they’ve only had, I think, seven all year or something like that before they played us,” White said. “So, to get them in 3rd and 10, to get them in 3rd and 9, and then to jump offsides off of a clap is very frustrating.”
With how often the penalties occur, it makes you ask yourself as an outsider, “Why do they keep happening?” or “What does South Carolina even do at practice?” Believe it or not, they have been working to try to fix this problem. It just hasn’t led to the results they’ve been looking for quite yet.
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“Obviously, we’re addressing it. It’s nothing personal to our guys, but we want to just keep learning from it and growing from it,” White said. “So obviously, in practice, if I’m scripting 15 plays in the period, I can only script 12 or 13 because we’re gonna work on jumping offsides.”
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Beamer followed by saying: “We have done this all along, but we did a whole lot of (claps) as you can imagine in practice today, so our defense doesn’t jump. Not that we all of a sudden starting that this week. We have been doing that as long as I have been the head coach here, but we clearly haven’t done a good enough job of it.”
Even with how much the coaches try to emphasize it, it still comes down to the players being discipline enough, especially with something as simple as not jumping offsides.
“We’re not mad at a kid personally,” White said. “But when you decide to play defense, that can happen to you.”
So, as South Carolina heads into a new week and faces Alabama this weekend, the hope is that the self-inflicted mistakes will slow down. Until then, the constant preaching from the coaching staff goes on.
“You realize that penalties are going to happen. I think it is just constantly educating. Holding guys accountable, which we do whether it be pre-snap, post-snap, during the snap. Really, just trying to emphasize and teach better than we have throughout the week, meetings and practice.”
