The key ingredient Saturday’s win gave the Gamecocks going forward
In high school football, good teams often schedule up in non-conference play to get their players battle tested. Many coaches also throw in at least one game where their team can run someone over and get the backups work. They do this to build confidence and get players feeling good about themselves.
South Carolina football coach Will Muschamp saw his team gain something similar over this weekend. The word he settled on to describe what the Gamecocks built in beating Georgia: Belief.
“So much goes into belief,” Muschamp said in an appearance on the “SEC this Morning” TV show. “Players have got to have some belief. You can demonstrate progress sometimes to them and say, ‘Look, we’re making progress here, statistically here, statistically there.’ But at the end of the day, you’ve got to win the game.”
Some have also described that as “proof of concept.” It’s the sense the work going in, the time spent are producing the outcomes the team is aiming for.
Before this week, the Gamecocks had won only a single game against a ranked opponent in Muschamp’s tenure. That came when USC was turning things around with Jake Bentley in his first season, catching Tennessee as they slipped from No. 9 in the country to unranked in two weeks. (They ended up at the edge of the top 25.)
That belief, that faith in the approach, it powers a team as it goes through the less fun parts of being a college player, the preparation and the grind that ultimately lead to the payoff.
“You’ve got to win some games against tough opponents, on the road, tough environment for them to continue to have belief to go out and prepare the right way,” Muschamp said. “To go out and practice the right way. To go out and watch film the right way. To go work out, to go through the offseason program the right way, to understand that what we’re doing are the right things. And that we do have the opportunity to do some special things here at South Carolina.
“That win helps us continue to have belief in the program.”
He’s only a few weeks removed from a moment when there was reason for folks inside and outside the building to have some cracks in their belief.
The team was coming off a 2018 that didn’t match expectations. They’d started this year 1-3, losing as a double-digit favorite to UNC and getting smothered offensively at Missouri.
The team seemed as if it would need to stabilize just to get to five wins, and needed a big upset to go bowling.
Thinks look different now, on the right side of possibly the program’s biggest upset ever. But Muschamp admitted he needed his seniors to help carry the team through the rough patches, and keeping that all in line is a challenge in the modern world.
“In this day and age, sometimes it’s hard because of all of the access that people have to your players as far as the negativity and things like that,” Muschamp said. “So staying as positive as we can and being as technical and being hard on them and being honest with them about where we are.”