How South Carolina turned over the RB position in one season

The 2016 South Carolina football team hit a point where it seemed only one running back ever played.

David Williams was in the dog house, and the heavy load of rushing, receiving and pass blocking was laid on the smaller shoulders of 180-pound redshirt freshman A.J. Turner. Oh, how things have changed.

“We have completely flipped our running back room to where we were in here a year ago,” South Carolina running backs coach Bobby Bentley said earlier this offseason. “We had one guy (Williams) that had carried the ball, and he had a couple hundred yards.

“Now we go from that position to where we’ve got two guys with over 1,200 yards that averaged 5.1 yards per carry.”

Turner went from a redshirt who had two carries in the spring game to accounting for 497 rushing yards and three touchdowns. Rico Dowdle went from high school quarterback and missing the start of the season to rolling up 764 yards, six scores and a starting spot across nine games

For Bentley, that’s a start.

“Obviously we’re not satisfied with that,” Bentley said. “We’ve got to do a better job against the SEC and the elite teams.”

And those two won’t be the only options.

Most notably, Ty’Son Williams can play after a transfer season. The Sumter-area product played a little for North Carolina as a true freshman, and impressed coaches and teammates throughout last year.

That’s to say nothing of former Wisconsin runner Caleb Kinlaw and Mon Denson, to whom Bentley directed some praise.

Coming out of the spring, it seemed likely Ty’Son Williams, Dowdle and Turner would get the lion’s share of the work, possibly with the prior two doing the heaviest lifting.

Bentley said they all had something to work on (notably pass protection for Dowdle) and that effort in practice was the key to time. He said the work there separated players, and the staff grades them every practice, spurring competition.

The coaches rely on some level of feel to manage workloads and riding the hot player in games, but Bentley expects his group will need more than two backs across the course of the season.

“We’re proud of our talent,” Bentley said. “Now, let’s go produce.”

This story was originally published July 24, 2017 at 3:12 PM.