Facing similar situation to Tennessee meltdown, Gamecock defense ‘dialed back in’
The characters were the same: a starting quarterback sidelined by a concussion, the guy he displaced as starter coming in, only to get hurt himself, the untested, unproven third-stringer and even a few Wildcat formations to get the ball in the hands of the team’s best playmaker.
Against Tennessee last weekend, they all added up to a 41 points and a miserable day for South Carolina’s defense. This Saturday against Vanderbilt, the script was flipped.
This time, the Gamecocks allowed the fewest yards of coach Will Muschamp’s tenure. This time, USC never allowed the Commodores to run a play inside the red zone. This time, Carolina allowed just one play for more than 20 yards and carried the offense to a 24-7 win.
“It definitely was more meaningful, you know,” sophomore cornerback Jaycee Horn said of the performance coming after the Tennessee loss. “Everybody knows the bad game we had last week, so that was one thing we focused on coming into this game was stopping a pass. (Defensive coordinator Travaris Robinson) let us play more aggressive, get in more receivers’ faces, and it worked in our favor.”
Early on, though, it seemed that all of the Tennessee game’s troubles had followed South Carolina home — Vanderbilt took advantage of some costly USC penalties to march down the field on its first drive, and senior quarterback Riley Neal, starting in place of junior Mo Hasan, found a wide-open receiver for a 26-yard touchdown pass.
“They hit us on the double move, that was something they set up pretty good,” Muschamp said of the touchdown pass. “They’ve run from that look the quick out, and we bit on it, you know, and that was probably over-coached by myself and T-Rob, we’d been playing that route. So that’s on me as a coach. That’s not on the players right there.”
But then Neal had to leave the game with an injury — coach Derek Mason said he thought it was a concussion but was unclear — and in came redshirt junior Deuce Wallace for the second drive of the game.
From there on out, South Carolina dominated. After allowing 57 yards of offense on that opening drive, the defense gave up just 132 the rest of the way, forcing six consecutive punts at one point.
“Just coming out and executed and focusing, I think that was the biggest thing, I’m not really sure exactly what happened with the focus on that,” senior linebacker T.J. Brunson said of the first drive. “But we dialed back in after we got on the sideline, tried to correct everything that we messed up.
Wallace was unable to replicate Neal’s success, completing just eight of 17 passes for only 30 yards. Twice he was picked off, setting up short fields for South Carolina.
“We just settled in and played our ball for the rest of the game,” Horn said.
And VU’s top playmaker, senior running back Ke’Shawn Vaughn, was bottled up for 87 yards on 20 carries. When Vanderbilt tried to run the Wildcat to get him the ball directly, the Gamecocks snuffed it out. After its first two drives, Vandy never entered South Carolina territory again.
“I think just this past week of practice, guys sat down and really started to understand, you know, our fits and details of the job. I think the biggest thing that we focused on was just being consistent, coming back and winning every single down,” Brunson said.
This story was originally published November 3, 2019 at 1:31 PM.
