South Carolina Football Offseason Autopsy, Part 2: Grading the Defense
By Kevin Miller
Though the transfer portal has dominated the discourse over the last week, South Carolina football fans’ last opportunity to see their favorite team on the field was about ten days ago. USC’s worst offensive performance of the season came against their bitter in-state rivals. The 16-7 loss to Clemson saw the Gamecocks total just 169 yards of offense in an embarrassing showing.
The loss was the wilted cherry on top of the disappointing, half-melted sundae that was the 2023 South Carolina football season. Sure, there were some bites in which the ice cream was still cold, and even mediocre ice cream is still enjoyable if it’s cold. However, there were even more bites that were full of nothing but the room temperature sugar milk that resulted from not enough attention being paid to the ice cream after putting it in the bowl.
From a team perspective, nothing was particularly good about the 2023 season. The offense and defense ranked in the bottom half of the country in points per game (77th), points per game allowed (68th), total yardage (81st), total yardage allowed (89th), 3rd-down success rate (110th), and defensive 3rd-down success rate (101st).
Now that the season is officially dead (the only 5-7 team that was invited to participate in this year’s bowl season was the Minnesota Golden Gophers), the offseason has begun, and it is time for an autopsy of the Gamecocks’ 2023 campaign.
A look into the Offseason Autopsy on the Carolina offense can be found here.
Let’s move on to the defense.
***All stats sourced from NCAA.com