The sign of a good coach isn’t a player’s ability to adapt to his system all the time, but his ability to evolve and adapt as the game around him evolves.

That’s the case for Dan Werner, who’s spent the latter part of his career learning and developing his own twist on the run-pass option (RPO) that he’s implementing at South Carolina now.

“I started studying different people that were doing it and I could sort of see that was the trend and was lucky enough to get around some good people and learn it,” he said this spring. “We’ve tweaked it as we’ve gone along.”

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Werner started coaching at UNLV in the 1990s with stops at Miami and Ole Miss before spending a year as an analyst under Nick Saban at Alabama.

Over the course of his career, he’d take a year off of coaching to travel and learn the intricacies of the RPO offense, taking different things from every style of offense he could.

“I wanted to formulate my own little mix,” Werner said. “I still want a pro-style passing attack but I wanted the spread style run stuff, then RPOs just started coming along. Nobody was even running them when I was running the spread stuff.”

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And in Werner’s short stint coaching quarterbacks at South Carolina, it’s starting to soak in for Jake Bentley and the rest of the group.

He started in January and has hit the ground running, working to install his own wrinkle in the offense this season heading into summer workouts.

So far, Bentley is getting the hang of it.

“That’s been his big thing this year coming in is dissecting the RPO and learning the ins and outs of everything of when to throw it and when to hand it off,” Bentley said. “Getting to pick his brain in that aspect has been great.”

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The Gamecocks are breaking in two coaches in new roles this spring and heading into fall camp: Werner with the quarterbacks and Bryan McClendon taking over as offensive coordinator.

For Bentley and the rest of the offensive players, it’s a change in pace from former offensive coordinator Kurt Roper, who was one of Will Muschamp’s first hires at South Carolina.

Werner and his RPO-based system brings a little breath of fresh air into this year’s offense, something that’s welcomed by Bentley.

“It’s been great. It’s always great to have a different way of saying things almost,” he said. “It may be the same teaching point but a different way Coach Werner says it. It hits a different way and you understand it a little better.”