Kentucky's defense will hope to add to South Carolina's offensive woes. (Vicky Graff Photo)
South Carolina quarterback LaNorris Sellers completed only 10 of 23 passes for 114 yards last Saturday in a 23-19 comeback win over Old Dominion that included a 41-yard pass to Florida State transfer Vandrevius Jacobs.
Jacobs also had an 18-yard catch but those were South Carolina’s only two pass plays of 15 or more yards.
However, South Carolina coach Shane Beamer knows his team can do a lot more with the passing attack going into this week’s game at Kentucky.
“We’ve got to be able to throw the ball better than what we did tonight, and we will, but we’ve also got to be able to execute when we call passes,” Beamer said after the game. “We had some drops. We had some routes that we didn’t run quite correctly. We had some protection issues. We had some misreads by the quarterback, so we’ve all got to coach better, no question about it, in the passing game.”
So let’s see if I get this. The only issues South Carolina has to fix are dropping passing, running incorrect routes, not protecting the quarterback and misreads by the quarterback. Seems like that should make UK defensive coordinator Brad White and his players feel pretty good going into Saturday’s game.
South Carolina ran the ball 53 times against Old Dominion. Sellers had 22 carries for 68 yards and a touchdown. Raheim Sanders finished with a team-high 24 carries and 88 yards and a touchdown.
“If you are able to keep the ball for 36 minutes tonight and run 56 times for close to 200 yards, it’s not a bad formula, but absolutely, we have to be able to throw the ball better than we did,” Beamer said.
Again, if the Gamecocks managed only 23 points against Old Dominion, that should not exactly strike fear into the UK defense even if South Carolina has beat the Cats the last two years.
“I know the narrative might be that the offensive line struggled. The offensive line played their butts off tonight. All the gurus out there that won’t want to break down the video, the offensive line played pretty good. Are there going to be some plays that they want back? Absolutely. We were atrocious tonight perimeter blocking. That was a key,” Beamer said.
“With the way Old Dominion plays defense, our guys outside the offensive line, the tight ends, running backs and receivers, they have to be able to block. You are not going to be able to run the ball successfully against this team if your players outside your five offensive linemen don’t do a great job. We were nowhere near good enough tonight at that.
“Offensive line has to be better. I am not sitting here anointing them the Joe Moore Award winners right now. I was proud of them for what they did tonight and there will be plays that they want to have back, there is no question about it. It is easy to sit there and say, ‘Offensive line struggled.’ The offensive line did a lot of really good things and played physical as heck.’”
Again, let’s see how the blocking goes against a much bigger, more physical and deeper UK defense.
4 Responses
When they play prevent defense on 3rd and long it rarely prevents anything. Stoops is going to have to play to win, especially when we get into SEC play.
3rd & 18 with So Miss at their own 9 and the UK D let them escape & that motivates them to drive down the field into scoring range. That was “playing not to lose”
SC should be a W, but the real test will be UGA.
The win over the Golden Eagles was marred by the weather. If we had finished the game would it have been a 48 to 3 win or would it have been a repeat of last year’s game? The entire team will be thinking about the Georgia game a week from Saturday, but we have to take care of business this Saturday. South Carolina should be a blowout game, but do we have the discipline and the mental toughness not to play down to the Gamecocks level? The penalties we were flagged with, our game execution, and some letdowns on 3rd and long show we still have work to do. Vandagriff needs to trust his running backs more and he missed some guys that were open that would have led to scores. It was the first game of the season, well 2/3 game, but even with our issues, it was still an impressive win. South Carolina is the perfect team for us to work out our kinks and produce a dominant win on both sides of the ball.
Got to figure out our 3rd and long defense, it was a big issue last year and looked the same against USM🤷♂️Overall team looked much improved in a lot of areas even with #1 RB out-it would be a real shame to let the 3rd and long on defense to continue to fester!!