What made this week of practice unique

SOUTH CAROLINA GAMECOCKS FOOTBALL

This week of practice is unique for South Carolina.

Usually around this time of year the Gamecocks are coming off a Clemson game and using this week to get healthy before starting bowl preparations. In a normal season, the only reason they’d be practicing this week is if they’re playing in a SEC Championship.

This week, though, they’re hosting Akron in a makeup game and are using this week of preparation for that to get a feel of what they hope can come.

“That’s what the plan is and that’s what we’re going to have in our minds the whole offseason,” Jake Bentley said. “We’re definitely getting a little taste this year to prepare us hopefully for what’s to come.”

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This year the Gamecocks fell short of one of their preseason goals—Beat the East—going 3-3 against their division this season.

Now, getting to practice the final week of November, the coaches are stressing this is the week South Carolina wants to be practicing for the foreseeable future.

“It’s preparing us for next year,” Kyle Markway said. “We’re going to be in Atlanta next year. It’s championship week, we have to get prepared to practice this week.”

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But this week, and this season, is unique in a few different ways.

Since the Marshall game was canceled earlier this year, the Gamecocks effectively got two bye weeks, including the regularly-scheduled one Oct. 20.

It’ll help next year with the 2019 schedule already including two bye weeks then as well, preparing players on next year’s team for what to expect with that.

There’s a bye scheduled Oct. 5 before a game at Georgia and another Nov. 23 after traveling to Texas A&M and before hosting Clemson.

“So we’ve been through that process now. So we understand that. The guys will tell you, I like to be able to practice things, regardless if it’s situational football,” Will Muschamp said. “But our goal is to go to Atlanta. If you go to Atlanta you’re going to be practicing at this time next year. We need to get used to practicing this week.”

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With this game getting scheduled so late in the year, the Gamecocks were somewhat behind the eight-ball in terms of building a game plan.

Usually the coaches spend the summer and offseason building the base game plans for every opponent on the schedule with different tweaks are made on a weekly basis.

The Gamecocks didn’t have that luxury this week but spent the last month or so watching film on the Zips and getting a game plan built.

“Obviously we didn’t do any summer work on Akron. That’s when we’d normally do the foundation of our game plan,” Muschamp said. “At this time of the year, there’s not a lot of new things that you’re going to see. I mean people do what they do. They may have a couple or wrinkles here and there, but you face that every week. That’s part of it.”