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
South Carolina Football Offseason Autopsy:
Grading the Defensive Coordinator
South Carolina football coach Shane Beamer has a decision to make this offseason about his defensive coordinator.
It has become glaringly obvious that Clayton White’s unit is a below-average group that can only operate at an above-average if they are forcing large amounts of turnovers. In the first 8 games of the year, the Gamecocks forced just 7 turnovers and were 2-6 (three of those takeaways came in the two wins).
When the Gamecocks recovered 6 fumbles and picked off 3 passes in games 9, 10, and 11, they went 3-0. Forcing just one total turnover against Clemson, South Carolina football lost the annual rivalry game.
White’s unit gave up at least 395 yards per game in 2023, the second year in a row they managed to post that unfortunate statistic. They also allowed over 200 yards rushing on four separate occasions (yielding an unsurprising 1-3 record in those games) and allowed at least one rushing touchdown and at least one passing touchdown in 9 of their 12 games this season.
Simply put, the Gamecock defense was bad in 2023, and it took a solid finish to the year (allowing 282 yards per game and 12 points per game in a new 3-3-5 defense) to keep them out of the bottom-10 nationally in most total defensive statistics.
White took entirely too long to make significant adjustments this season. The Gamecocks were getting gashed in their base 4-2-5 look, and White’s stubbornness in playing safeties at nickel (he started 5 different players at nickel who were part of the 2-deep at safety this season) resulted in two different receivers (Tulu Griffin of Mississippi State and Ricky Pearsall of Florida) to set career highs in receiving yards. Three others came close, as well.
It remains to be seen if the final three games of the year did enough to overcome the previous 9 in the mind of Coach Beamer as evaluates his coaching staff for potential changes.
South Carolina Football Offseason Autopsy:
Grading the Defensive Coaching
The Gamecock defense was bad for most of the 2023 season, so it is no surprise that the perception is that the defensive coaching staff didn’t have a very good showing, as well.
White’s secondary job as the team’s linebackers coach is a failure because he rarely does that job. Graduate assistants and analysts handle much of the positional coaching duties for White, something that has been evident on the field. The emergence of Debo Williams as a good run stopper and the late-season surge from Bam Martin-Scott helped mask this deficiency.
With Williams and Martin-Scott expected to return next year, and with Stone Blanton, Pup Howard, and Jaron Willis getting another offseason of development, there is a chance that the linebacker unit will be the best position group on the defense in 2024. However, coaching at the position has to be better (maybe with a full-time assistant).
Torrian Gray’s defensive backfield struggled mightily at times this season. Some of that was the scheme (as talked about often this season, the Gamecocks put safeties at nickel and asked them to play man coverage), but Carolina was unable to replace NFL corners Cam Smith and Darius Rush in an adequate way, either.
It is hard to tell how much the secondary’s struggles in 2023 were because of White’s stubbornness with his 4-2-5 and his safety-nickels and how much the struggles were because of personnel and coaching. However, it is easy to know that it all must be better moving forward, and the Gamecocks need Torrian Gray to coach like vintage Torrian Gray to make it happen.
The duo of Travian Robertson and Sterling Lucas split the duties of coaching the players up front, and the Gamecock defensive line hasn’t been good enough.
To be fair, Travian Robertson was in his first year as the defensive tackles coach, and Jimmy Lindsey (the previous coach) didn’t seem to do a whole lot of developing or recruiting to help the room. Lucas has been really good as a recruiter and has spent time coaching in the NFL, so it feels like it only will be a matter of time before he has a consistently good EDGE unit.
After the 3-3-5 switch, Robertson and Lucas got better performances from their position groups, and the linebackers played better, as well, indicating that much of the defensive issues were more scheme-related than player or coach failures. The position coaches aren’t off the hook for the bad year, but things were not as bad from a position coach standpoint as it seemed from the outside.
South Carolina Football Offseason Autopsy:
Grading the Defensive Line Play
The Gamecock defensive line didn’t play well enough as a whole in 2023. However, the problems were not easily identifiable nor were they consistent.
For example, TJ Sanders led the Gamecocks in tackles for loss and sacks and was the SEC’s Defensive Lineman of the Week after a great performance against Georgia. He also had four games with 1 or 0 tackles.
Tonka Hemingway came into the season with high expectations and did not have the type of year that many were hoping he’d have. He flashed more good moments as the season went on, and when he played better, so did the rest of the defense.
Boogie Huntley was asked to do more than he should have in 2023. At just 300 pounds, he’s a little smaller than most nose tackles, but that was the role he played most of the season. Even so, he had some good performances.
The EDGE position was bad. The team only had two true defensive ends who saw much playing time as redshirt senior Tyreek Johnson was finally healthy, and JT Geer played his first year in Columbia after transferring from Syracuse. Neither player was bad, but Johnson’s limited athleticism and Geer’s injury situation kept them from being major factors.
The hybrid outside linebacker/defensive end types on the roster didn’t get home much this season. Bryan Thomas and Jordan Strachan certainly had some good moments, but neither player made much of an impact outside of Strachan’s game against Kentucky. Freshman Desmond Umeozulu needed more time to be ready for the SEC, as well, but he was forced into action.
Defensive linemen like Nick Barrett, Elijah Davis, and Drew Tuazama were non-factors all season, and the Gamecocks really needed them to step up to have a good year up front. That didn’t happen, putting too much stress on the top four or five guys.
South Carolina Football Offseason Autopsy:
Grading the Linebackers
Early in the 2023 campaign, the Gamecock linebacking corps looked to be a huge negative for the team. Despite some decent tackling totals, Debo Williams and Stone Blanton were being taken advantage of in coverage, and run fits were a bit hit-or-miss at times.
Both players got better as the season went along, and the emergence of Bam Martin-Scott helped the unit in a big way.
By the end of the year, the Gamecocks felt really good about Williams and Martin-Scott, and Blanton’s role made a lot more sense when yielding some snaps to Pup Howard and Jaron Willis.
Williams finished strong enough to lead the SEC in solo tackles (and finish 3rd in total tackles), and he was chosen as a 2nd-team All-SEC performer for his efforts. Martin-Scott had 28 tackles over the last three games of the year, and though none of the ‘backers were coverage stalwarts, the unit was better against the pass after the switch to the 3-3-5.
The late-season improvements bring this grade up a lot. The poor pass defense and inconsistent run stopping would have yielded a pretty bad score. Instead, over the final three games, the linebackers tallied 73 total tackles, and they were the best pass rushers on that team over that same span.
South Carolina Football Offseason Autopsy:
Grading the Secondary
A lot of South Carolina football fans felt bad for the secondary this season. Not only did they struggle, but they were not put in situations to succeed very often.
Defensive coordinator Clayton White put his run-stopping safeties in man coverage over and over again to disastrous results. Two opposing receivers set career highs while operating primarily in the slot against these safeties-playing-nickel, and three more were close to doing the same.
As was true with the rest of the defense, the defensive backfield was much better in the 3-3-5. Nick Emmanwori and Jalon Kilgore were better when asked to play zone (something safeties should be doing), and Marcellas Dial was good in man coverage to end his Gamecock career.
Young corners Judge Collier and Emory Floyd had to get a lot of snaps this season, and the experience they got was valuable, even if it came with some struggles. O’Donnell Fortune had stretches of play where he was as “sticky” as Dial and other stretches where he looked lost.
For a good chunk of the season, South Carolina football was in the bottom-10 of the entire country in pass defense, an obvious indictment of the secondary, despite the poor coaching that made some of that possible.
The Gamecock defense also dropped a ridiculous amount of potential interceptions, and snagging a couple of those passes could have gone a long way in salvaging this season (and this grade). Nonetheless, the secondary’s underperforming games outnumbered their good ones, and the grade can’t be a good one even with the late-season improvements.