Vershon Lee on the challenges O-Line faced last season
Like a zit on the middle of your forehead when you were in high school, the offensive line is one of the positions where when things get ugly, it’s hard to hide it.
In a recent exclusive Garnet Trust interview, rising junior offensive lineman Vershon Lee helped make sense of some of the challenges that held the Gamecocks back at times.
“It was just like, sometimes when things become inconsistent, which is what we’re working on is being consistent. When it gets inconsistent, it can be pretty ugly,” said Lee.
Last season, South Carolina’s offensive line ranked towards the bottom in the SEC in nearly every metric recorded by Pro Football Focus. Metrics aside, the Gamecocks allowed the second most sacks in the conference last year.
But was that all on the offensive line? No, but when you’re being heavily scrutinized, it becomes easier for others to pile on despite offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield saying in March that after reviewing the tape of last season, the offensive line was responsible for only 14 of the 31 sacks given up last season.
This isn’t a “let’s make excuses for the O-Line” piece but rather some clarity as to some additional challenges USC faced last year. Offensive line coach Greg Adkins had been dealing with health issues last season. So much so that it led to him missing some practices and a game.
A lot of things that coach (Greg) Adkins teaches us is consistency. When things started going up and down a lot he tried to keep us consistent. When he left (the team) for a couple of weeks, things started to waver out. To a point where Eric Douglas, Jovaughn Gwyn, and all of the older heads they just put their foot down and were like, ‘guys, we have to step up and do what we need to do.’ So at the end of the season you could probably see that we started playing better.”
With Adkins around and a year in a new system under a new offensive coordinator, Lee has been pleased with the growth the offensive line carried from the end of last season to into the spring but knows it comes down to being consistent.
“You have to be able to trust your play-calling and a lot of times when you don’t trust your play-calling you might think ‘this step’ would be better. But if you trust your steps and your consistent with all your steps, it makes the plays and everything look better. Even if you mess up on a step, if everybody around you is consistent and we all do the same step, it could be a gain of one or a gain of two but when everybody is inconsistent and doing their own thing, that’s when you get the loss yardage plays and the plays were everybody is like, ‘what happened there.”
