Shane Beamer shares why he 'wants to be balanced' with explosive plays
Through the early weeks of spring practice, there’s a lot of optimism for South Carolina. While there’s still a ways to go before the real season begins, the players have already started hyping up what’s in store.
“It’s going to be really fun to watch,” Luke Doty said about the offense. “There’s going to be a lot of explosive plays, a lot of downhill runs. Just plays being made everywhere by a lot of different guys.”
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When head coach Shane Beamer was asked about his expectations, he agreed that the big plays will have to be a part of what the team does this season.
“We count explosive plays as a run over 12 yards and a pass over 18 yards. Same thing defensively, if you’re giving up 12-yard runs and 18-yard passes or more, that’s giving up explosives,” Beamer said.
Beamer pointed out that South Carolina is 16-2 in games where it wins the explosive play battle, which isn’t surprising considering what that can do for success. But at the same time, he doesn’t want to be on the other end of giving up those big plays.
“If you have a lot of big plays, your chances of winning are going to go up. But it’s something that we’ve emphasized, always have,” Beamer said. “Really emphasized to our players about being explosive offensively and then not giving up explosives defensively, which we did too many times at times last year.”
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Instead of just looking at it from an offensive perspective, Beamer looks at it on the whole. He wants his team to be more balanced. And there were times last year where South Carolina struggled to do that on both sides of the ball.
“Yeah, we want to be explosive, but as always, we want to be balanced,” he said. “Well, what does that mean? To me, it’s about 50-50. It’s the ability to run the ball and the ability to throw the ball when we need to throw it. Protecting the football, we were better last year at protecting the football offensively. But still not where we want to be. We were dead last my first two years here. We were a lot better last season, but we certainly could continue to improve that.”
Beyond explosiveness, Beamer said he wants to figure out who the go-to players are going to be and how to get them the ball. And that goes hand in hand with doing what he wants to do this year.
“We’re deeper at running back. Yes, we lost a lot of production at wide receiver with Xavier (Legette) gone. But we have more depth in that room, I think we have more depth in the tight end room,” Beamer said. “So it’s exciting to watch those guys get out there and compete. Let’s figure out who our best guys are, how we get them the ball and not try and say, ‘This is our offense, you have to adapt to what we want to do.’ We want to be multiple enough to where we can adapt to our personnel.”
