Five areas Will Muschamp wants to see improve
After every season, the Gamecock coaching staff spends a good chunk of the offseason doing what Will Muschamp calls a “quality control” assessment, and it’s no different after a lackluster 2019.
As Muschamp and his staff get started with spring practice, there are five “critical factors” the Gamecocks are working on specifically.
Turnover margin
Muschamp said this stat needs to improve “tremendously” after last season where the Gamecocks finished just plus-3, good for fifth in the SEC in large part because they didn’t turn the ball over.
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They averaged just 1.2 turnovers per game last year but didn’t turn it over at the same rate as other Muschamp-coached teams in the past. South Carolina finished with 17 takeaways, which was good for eighth in the league and it needs to improve because of the direct impact it has on winning and losing games.
“Turnover margin we need to improve tremendously. We were plus three, we only gave up the ball 14 times, and we had only created 17 turnovers. That's a team stat. We've got to do a better job of creating opportunities for our football team,” Muschamp said. “It's the number one stat in ball to be successful. You look at last year, we won the turnover margin in five games, we won four of them. We tied or lost the turnover margin in seven games, we lost all seven games.”
Explosive play ratio
The Gamecocks spend a lot of time in practice emphasizing explosive plays—rushes of 10 or more yards, passes of 20 or more—and the importance they have on determining the outcome of games.
Last year an anemic offense averaged nine per game and Muschamp said that has to improve.
‘In those situations, you win it in five games and you win four of those games, you lose it in seven or tie in seven games, and you lose those seven games,” he said. “So the two most critical factors if you really want to just boil it down is turnover margin and explosive play ratio, and that's where we've got to make some tremendous improvements with our team.”
Field position
The Gamecocks struggled to score points and it was in part because they couldn’t get great starting field position. Muschamp credits that to lack of special teams production at times. Rod Wilson and Kyle Krantz take over as the special teams coaches this season after Coleman Hutzler’s departure.
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“A lot of that goes to special teams with your coverage units, your return units, to be able to create short fields for your offense, to create long fields for your defense,” Muschamp said. “And in the last three years, we're 18-5 in games where we win the field position battle. We're 0-9 when we don't. So that's something, again, we're going in back, and what do we need to do to improve and get better in those situations?”
Red zone efficiency
After spending the entire preseason about bettering their red zone numbers (70 percent touchdowns), the Gamecocks fell flat. They’d finish 11th in the conference in red zone offense, scoring on 77.1 percent of their just 35 trips with touchdowns coming on 17.
Defensively, they were middle of the road, ranking seventh, and are looking to improve this spring.
“We want to score offensively 100 percent of the time we're down there and we want to be hit 75 percent for touchdowns. You'll lead the league if that's where you are. We're at 48 percent last year; critical issues of not being able to score touchdowns in the red zone,” Muschamp said. “Defensively, we want to be able to hold our opponent to 60 percent, holding them to a field goal. We're right at 52 to 53 percent there, which is not bad. It's the best we've been since we've been here, but certainly is improvement. We need to improve from that.”
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Winning the fourth quarter
Last year closing games was an issue with the Gamecocks outscoring teams by 14 in the first half but getting outscored by 18 in the third quarters of games and outscored 107-64 in the fourth quarter last year.
“We've been a good situational team up till last year. We're 13-5 in one-score games in the first three years which is really good. That means you're making good decisions as coaches, good decisions as players," Muschamp said. "In critical situations when the games coming down the line, we're 1-2 in one-score games last year, but we didn't give ourselves the opportunity in a lot of those situations when we should've been in a one-score game at least to have an opportunity to win the game.”
