The South Carolina football season will begin officially in just 44 days when the Old Dominion Monarchs travel to Columbia for an afternoon kickoff at Williams-Brice Stadium, and as Gamecock head coach Shane Beamer remarked during this week's SEC Media Days, expectations aren't as high outside of the program as they are inside of it for this season.
The Gamecocks have been projected to finish anywhere from 4-8 to 8-4 by college football analysts, but Beamer and company seem to believe that the team can go 8-4 or even better.
For that to happen, USC will have to have a lot of things go well for them this fall, including successfully incorporating a large number of transfer portal players into the mix.
One of the transfers who joined the South Carolina football program this offseason is #44 Monkell Goodwine, a big defensive lineman who played the previous three years with the Alabama Crimson Tide before transferring to the South Carolina football program this winter.
Goodwine is big and athletic, and at 6'3" and over 310 pounds, he is the type of defensive tackle who can play nose in the Gamecocks' 3-3-5 defensive base or either tackle spot in the 4-2-5.
Carolina's defensive tackle depth chart is loaded with talent as TJ Sanders, Tonka Hemingway, Boogie Huntley, and Nick Barrett return from last year's rotation, and Goodwine and DeAndre Jules joined the team through the portal. Competition will be fierce at the position, but if the end of last season is any indication, defensive tackles coach Travian Robertson would like to rotate his guys heavily, especially in the 3-3-5 when some of the tackles also will play defensive end.
Sanders, Hemingway, and Huntley are locks for the rotation this fall, but both Goodwine and Jules had good spring showings for their new team. Similarly-built players, the two transfers will battle with Nick Barrett for 3-3-5 nose tackle reps behind Huntley (and, potentially, Sanders) and could factor into both tackle battles in the 4-2-5.
Goodwine and the Gamecocks start their 2024 season on August 31st.