What Marcus Freeman, Notre Dame players said about South Carolina

Thursday was the official press conference day at the Gator Bowl with South Carolina and Notre Dame each meeting with the media before Friday’s game (3:30 p.m., ESPN).

Fighting Irish head coach Marcus Freeman, linebacker JD Bertrand and offensive lineman Jarrett Patterson spoke with plenty of good to say about the Gamecocks.

Here is a look at what they said about South Carolina heading into the game.

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Freeman on the job Shane Beamer’s done at South Carolina: “You talk about a guy, I think his second year of being the head coach at South Carolina, first head coaching job, I think he’s done an excellent job of recruiting, developing and improving. That’s the challenge, is to continue to enhance your roster but develop your roster that you have.

What you’re seeing is a team throughout the season getting better and better and better. At one point you could have seen his season, the South Carolina season, going one way or the other. They went one way, and that was they went vertical, got better. That’s to me a reflection of the way he’s led. He’s done a great job with this football program.”

Bertrand on Spencer Rattler: “I mean, the biggest thing is he’s an athlete, he’s able to make plays with both his feet and in the air. His ability to extend plays beyond just the usual of being able to stay in the pocket, three on the run, just be able to make those third-and-shorts, that low area red zone, being able to scramble or get those extra yards, convert the first downs, get into the end zone. That obviously has been a big point of emphasis for us.”

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Freeman on preparing for South Carolina’s new players who will play Friday: Yeah, I think that’s why I said earlier, we do a lot of good on good in practice because when you have almost a month to prepare for an opponent, sometimes that’s too much time.

The beauty of playing a team in seven days is that you can only watch so much film. Right now we have 12 games. Really you can talk about two years’ worth of film. These guys are junkies. All they do is watch film. Sometimes you can watch too much and assume you know exactly what the other team is going to do. You don’t know.

Just like we’re preparing to make sure we self-evaluate, that we’re not just doing the same things over and over, we’re sure South Carolina is doing the same thing.

We spend a lot of time going good on good, meaning our offense has to go against our defense, which isn’t South Carolina’s defense, and our defense has to go to against our offense, which isn’t South Carolina’s offense.

That forces you really to be able to execute off of your fundamentals, off of your basic schemes, basic concepts, and not just always try to attack a different opponent’s tendencies.

That’s a long answer to your question of with opt-outs, you don’t know. You don’t know what you’re going to see. We don’t know what we’ll see tomorrow. We’ll have an idea, we’ll have the base concepts that they do on offense and defense and special teams, but we obviously have to prepare for some different wrinkles and things we haven’t seen.”

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Bertrand on South Carolina’s red zone offense: “They’re a very talented team. They have the ability to go in and out of different personnel groups and also be able to go into the wildcat look. So just being able to prepare properly, and then also looking at ourselves, making sure we are fundamentally sound going into this game after not playing a month.”

Bertrand on watching South Carolina the last two weeks versus the previous 10 games: “I mean, one of the biggest things is you can see they’re clicking towards the last two games. Things were working really well, especially against two really good opponents. Obviously, they’re hot at this moment. You know they’re going to come in confident, they’re going to come in with that kind of swagger. At the same time we know that we can look at those kind of clips and those kinds of games right there, but know that that kind of is something that they’re looking to enhance and kind of go off of. Also know that with the guys that they’re potentially having in the transfer portal and stuff, we can look back at ourselves and work on improving ourselves.”

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Patterson on watching South Carolina the last two weeks versus the previous 10 games: “I think you pay more attention, the last couple games, really any opponent, schematically from September to the end of November, things are a lot different. Players improve, injuries, opt-outs, transfers, things like that happen.

Similar to what JD said, this team played really good football. They beat two top-10 teams, and they play with that swagger. It shows on film. We’re going to have to come out ready to play tomorrow.”

Freeman on watching South Carolina the last two weeks versus the previous 10 games: “I’ll reiterate what they said. When you prepare to play a team, you want to prepare to play the best, what you’ve seen them put on film being their best. The last two games they’ve shown they can beat any team in the country.

That’s our challenge. That’s the team we’re going to face. We’ll see what happens tomorrow, but that’s what our mental preparation has to be.”

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