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Nobody wants to talk about what happened on the road last season. It is all in the past, or so South Carolina wants to believe.
The Gamecocks were outscored 56-13 in first quarters and 112-27 in first half on the road in SEC play in 2021, and all four games resulted in losses.
Road performances — and especially road starts — will be a key swing point for the 2022 team. It starts with one of their key swing games, an 11 am local time kickoff against the No. 16 Arkansas Razorbacks.
“We really don’t talk about last year,” starting right guard Jovaughn Gwyn said. “We’re just working to get better; that’s all we’ve been working on since fall camp. Just working to get better and working on us pretty much.”
In terms of working on themselves, part of the equation is the road struggles. Shane Beamer has moved different practice periods around without providing any warning to his coaching staff or players in an attempt to simulate the adversity his team will face on the road. He has talked about simulating halftimes during practices with strategically planned breaks in the middle.
South Carolina won its last early kickoff in the 2021 Duke’s Mayo Bowl against North Carolina and went 2-1 in early games under Beamer last season, although all three were noon local time starts. The team has not played a game under Beamer with a kickoff set for before noon local time.
“I think if you all of the sudden wait until this week to start doing stuff, it’s probably too late,” Beamer said. “A lot of the things that we’ve done since January have been trying to prepare us to perform better on the road and play well on the road. We’ll certainly do some things this week also. We practice in the mornings, so 11 am is right up our alley. 11 am central is 12 eastern, so we’re basically done with practice every day by the time kickoff will be.”
Spencer Rattler was not around last season for the road, but is relatively inexperienced on the road for a QB in his fourth year of college football. Rattler has only started four true road games as a collegiate quarterback and three of them were in partially or completely empty stadiums due to COVID-related crowd restrictions in 2020.
While he has played at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas for the Red River Rivalry against Texas, in two conference championship games and two New Years Six bowl games, the lone time in his entire career Rattler has played a road game in a campus stadium came at Kansas State in 2021.
The then Oklahoma Sooner did play very well in this limited sample size, completing 22-of-25 passes for 243 yards in a 37-31 win over the Wildcats. But Arkansas will be a different type of environment, and Rattler knows it as well as anybody, growing up a Razorbacks fan, due to his father’s family being from Conway, Arkansas.
“We’ve just got to go in there and know you’re all you got,” Rattler said. “We’re going to be probably the only Gamecocks in there. We’re all that we need, so we’ve got to be in there and have a great mindset. Stay positive — there’s going to be adversity at times — but you’ve got to love playing on the road in an environment like that. I’m excited, and I know everybody else is fired up.”
Defensively, South Carolina will have an enormous challenge on its hands with an offense coming off a 447-yard outburst against a playoff team from a year ago in Cincinnati. It was an almost perfectly balanced performance with 224 yards rushing and 223 passing and 12 different players receiving at least one touch.
Sam Pittman’s team is similar to Georgia State in its run-first identity — Pittman is a former offensive line coach and the Razorbacks did have 45 rushes to 26 passes against Cincinnati — but will offer a much more dynamic passing attack than what the Panthers posed in week one.
“They’re a real challenge starting with their size, but they’re well-coached and then they’re very multiple,” Beamer said about Arkansas. “Last week, there wasn’t a lot of formations that you were going to get from Georgia State. This week you’re going to get a lot of formations, and then a lot of stuff happening within those formations, too.”
After a strong start on the opening script, South Carolina managed to bottle up Georgia State. The Panthers gained 67 out of their 200 rushing yards for the game on just the first drive, and another 44 on one late fourth quarter burst with the margin decided. Outside of those, South Carolina held Georgia State to just 89 rushing yards on 30 attempts, a significant improvement from last season’s porous defense.
But now comes the challenge of sustaining it, and sustaining it against an opponent with a bigger, faster offensive line. And of course, trying to finally clear the road hurdle.
“It’s always exciting playing on the road in the SEC,” linebacker Brad Johnson said. “Being able to go in there and take over somebody else’s house. My mentality is really just to take the field as if it’s the practice field or at home or wherever. It doesn’t matter where we play — put the ball down. On defense that’s our mentality, so that’s kind of what I go out with.”
