One of the biggest question marks from an offensive perspective entering preseason camp is not a litany of starting spots being up for grabs or a wealth of newcomers having to play, but instead what it all will look like.
With Shane Beamer and offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield not having much to put on tape in recent history to give hints of what the Gamecocks will look like this season, although before camp starts Beamer said it will be a conglomeration of a lot of different offenses.
“Blending what he and I have done at different places along with the other fantastic coaches we have on our offensive staff and what they’ve done at different places,” Beamer said. “At the end of the day, you better do what you have the personnel to do. I feel like we have the offensive system that’s multiple and flexible enough to get the ball to our play makers.”
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Beamer hasn’t been an offensive coordinator before but was an offensive assistant under Lincoln Riley at Oklahoma, widely regarded as one of the best offensive minds in football today.
Satterfield hasn’t been a head coach or offensive coordinator since 2017 but has called plays at UT Martin, Chattanooga, Temple and Tennessee Tech and has learned under Matt Rhule, current head coach of the Carolina Panthers, and Joe Brady, the architect of LSU’s 2019 national championship offense and current offensive coordinator with the Panthers.
Last week Satterfield said this year’s iteration of South Carolina offensively will merge a lot of the schematic principles of his previous stops.
“You’d have to watch LSU in 2019, have to watch when I had PJ Walker at Temple in 2015, you’d have to watch a little bit in what we did with the Panthers last year, you’ll have to watch a little bit of Oklahoma,” Satterfield said. “You’d have to dibble and dabble around with all of it. We’re going to do some good stuff.”
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South Carolina will begin training camp Friday and will spend the next four weeks installing and shaping the offense to what it wants to look like.
Coming out of spring, the offensive staff had a better idea of what the team will want to specialize in and has tweaked some of the installation for training camp to better fit the scheme to the personnel.
“When you come out of spring practice there are certainly things you planned to implement going into it,” Beamer said. “You come out of spring practice and say, ‘Know what? Maybe we don’t quite have the personnel to do that right now,’ or, ‘Maybe there are some things we didn’t think we’d major in that we got around our personnel and said in what we’re going to be with our offense this is something we certainly need to implement. There’s quite a bit of that, and it’ll still be a work in progress as we go through the preseason.”
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South Carolina’s best personnel skews towards the offensive line, tight ends and running backs. The Gamecocks return six players who started one game last year, three who played in all 10 games.
They also have a host of talented tight ends and return the league’s regular season leading rusher in Kevin Harris while incorporating five-star back MarShawn Lloyd back into the fold.
Regardless of what the offense will look like, there are some non-negotiable terms for Beamer in what he wants in his offensive identity.
“At the end of the day I hope when you watch our football team you’re blown away by the physicality and the toughness we play with. Nowadays in college football, in any football, you better be able to create explosive plays. We want to create explosive plays,” he said.
“We need to be able to run it when we have to run it and throw it when we have to throw it and get the ball to our playmakers and do what we do best. We’re not trying to force a square peg into a round hole, either.”
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