Tight end Trey Knox settling in with Gamecocks
Trey Knox feels like he is back home.
The former Arkansas tight end transferred to South Carolina this offseason, joining up with a pair of coaches he knows well and trying to help a new offensive coordinator establish an identity. And two weeks before spring football has even started, he is already brightening up the football building.
“He’s a guy that always has positive energy,” Shane Beamer said. “He’s an athletic guy that I think is working really, really hard in the weight room, on special teams, on offense. I think it’s been a good transition for him.”
The Gamecocks added Florida tight end Nick Elksnis, Western Kentucky’s Joshua Simon and a highly-rated recruiting class including five-star Nyckoles Harbor. But coming in at 6-foot-5 and 245 pounds with four years of college football under his belt, Knox is the tight end with the most college football experience and production.
He caught 26 passes for 296 yards and five touchdowns last season despite playing in a run-first offense in Fayetteville, and has 81 receptions for 892 yards and nine scores in his college career.
“I think I will catch a lot more balls here,” Knox said. “I was a big blocker at Arkansas, which I don’t mind. Blocking is part of the game and it helped me for the long run, so I ended up appreciating that. I think I will be used in an actual tight end role catching more passes, blocking down field [and] blocking on the premier, but also getting involved in the pass game a lot.”
Although the entire room will engage in a process of trying to learn a new program and a new system, Knox will have a little bit of a head start over the rest of his competition. His position coach at Arkansas was Dowell Loggains, now South Carolina’s offensive coordinator. Loggains and Knox spent two years together with the Razorbacks, and Knox’s South Carolina connections do not stop there.
Current South Carolina wide receivers coach Justin Stepp also used to coach at Arkansas, and he was one of the primary recruiters before he arrived on campus in the class of 2019. Knox said he “bear hugged” Stepp the first time he saw him in Columbia, harkening back to a relationship the two have had since he was 17-years-old.
With longstanding personal connections to the coaching staff and a little bit of a base understanding about Loggains and his offensive philosophy, Knox projects to be a huge piece of the passing puzzle in 2023.
“We’re not necessarily taking everything that they did at Arkansas and saying all the sudden this is our offense at Carolina,” Beamer said. “But there is some carryover in certain elements offensively where from a learning standpoint, I think that’s been a little bit easier for Trey and he can help those other tight ends.”
From a production standpoint, Knox is going to have to help patch up big holes. South Carolina lost all of its scholarship tight ends off last year’s roster when Jaheim Bell and Austin Stogner transferred, Nate Adkins graduated and Traevon Kenion retired from football.
Bell in particular is going to be a very difficult player to replace. Despite ups-and-downs with his usage, he was still a crucial target for Spencer Rattler in the passing game and served as the team’s primary running back in November while the backfield suffered through a flurry of injuries. At 6-foot-3 and 232 pounds he was not quite as big as Knox, but offered a similar type of physical mismatch for defenses to account for every single time he lined up.
“I definitely have seen some tape of how they used Jaheim, and I think I can do the same thing,” Knox said. “I think I’m very versatile, and I think the coaching staff knows that as well. We’re just going to find ways to get our playmakers the ball in space, make space and make people make tackles.”
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