Whenever a team is entering a season opener—especially one where its favored by right around 40 points—it would be easy to create a vanilla game plan, run the ball and worry about getting out of there with a win and relatively injury free.

That vanilla game plan doesn’t seem to be the prerogative for South Carolina’s coordinator’s Marcus Satterfield and Clayton White.

“There’s nothing that’s going to be held back. We’re not taking anything for granted. We’re 0-0. We haven’t won a game, we haven’t won a game here as a staff,” Satterfield said. “We have to go out there and compete and execute at the highest level. We’ve not earned the right to hold anything back yet.”

Not holding back doesn’t mean the Gamecocks are going to run six reverses and a handful of double passes but it doesn’t sound like Satterfield is content with turning around and handing the ball off 70 times either.

There’s going to be a good balance, it seems as the Gamecocks try to work out some of the inevitable kinks destined to pop up in a season opener and get Shane Beamer his first win as the Gamecocks’ head coach.

“We’re going to go out there, play our game, go as hard as we can and run the plays we’ve been practicing in camp and see what happens. There’s not one thought in our minds of holding anything back. We have to go compete and try to win a game.”

Satterfield’s in a different position than White, not having called a play in a handful of years with teams not having much film on him in recent years; they’d have to go back to 2017 during his time as Tennessee Tech’s head coach, then his days at Temple.

White, on the other hand was defensive coordinator the last four season and, like he said, a good opposing offensive staff is going to have an idea on his base calls from his time at Western Kentucky.

The goal for White—who mentioned he’s not going to call every single coverage or stunt in the playbook Saturday—is to play his defense see the Gamecocks execute it.

“I’m going to focus on us as a defense. I’m not going to say I’m going to open up the playbook and call every call but there are some staples we will run every single week. I’m not afraid to show those,” White said.

“It’s not like I have anything to hide. There’s four years of it. Most people are going to put the work in and get it figured out in the summer. I have nothing to hide to be honest with you.”

From a special teams standpoint, coordinator Pete Lembo mentioned just wanting his unit to look like they’ve gone out there and done it before and not beat themselves.

It’s hard from a week-to-week basis to create wrinkles schematically, but there might be tweaks from game to game on Lembo’s core philosophies.

“It’s a very fine line. The number of practice reps you get is very limited. So if you have too many options, too many different possibilities you won’t be able to get them all practiced and you won’t be able to get them practiced against the multitude of looks you could potentially see in a game,” Lembo said.

“It’s important you have a core of schemes that’s your foundation, and then you might tweak things week to week. It’s really hard to walk in on a Tuesday or Wednesday getting ready for Georgia and say we just reinvented the wheel.”

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