After tough 2019, so much future ahead for South Carolina’s Ryan Hilinski
The rest of the offense moved on, and Ryan Hilinski stood frozen.
The final seconds of the South Carolina quarterback’s freshman season were draining away Saturday afternoon. Ten other offensive players moved toward the mass of orange set to meet a mass of black with a little garnet in the middle of the Williams-Brice Stadium field.
But Hilinski stood a beat, seeming to stop and soak it all in.
He moved into the standard post-game handshakes, greeting and slapping hands with a few Tigers. Clemson defensive coordinator Brent Venables appeared beside him, excited as always and complimentary.
Hilinski limped throughout, walking slowly. He’d taken so many hits through the season and needed surgery for a partially torn meniscus once the year was complete.
He wandered for a moment, appearing to look for someone before finding Tanner Muse, a Clemson safety, and his brother Nick, a Gamecocks tight end and one of his best friends on the team.
He peeled away for the alma mater, and after that, again stood with a long stare. He shared moments with teammates, a longer one with offensive lineman Wyatt Campbell and then with senior center Donell Stanley, ending with each man giving a few punches to the other’s breastplate.
‘Most good players do’ this
The 2019 season had a lot of on-field turbulence for Hilinski.
The first-year California product battled elbow tendinitis and suffered a slight tear of his meniscus. He was thrown into the fire as a true freshman quarterback, and often got pummeled behind a young and porous offensive line.
And something about the way he leads the team — really the way he’s carried himself through much of his time as a football player — meant he particularly felt the struggles of the team in his first year on campus.
“This is a great quality, so I’m not being negative at all. What a great quality to have — Ryan burdens a lot on himself,” Gamecocks coach Will Muschamp said the week before that Clemson game. “Most good players do. Most good players want to put it on their shoulders, and when it’s good, it’s good, and when it’s not good, it’s all there.
“We got to play better around him. We’ve got to do a better job of coaching around him and in situations to give him some more opportunities. Ryan has burdened a lot on himself, and that’s something we can’t have happen.”
This was a quarterback who after a loss to Missouri — with a listless offense — went to the defense to apologize for what happened.
His season was far from ideal.
He had to throw more often than was good, tossing 50 passes in three different games (becoming the first USC QB to ever do that). The help around him suffered as well. He played four games without one of his top top backs. His receiving and tight ends group was a perpetual MASH unit.
And then there were his own injuries. The elbow cost him most of the practice week before Missouri. The knee cost him chunks of practice the rest of the way. He seemed to end every game with a hitch in his gait, an amalgamation of injuries and the hits he was taking.
At the end, he had his coach talking about seeing a little extra zip on his ball after an off week. But his persona in the locker room didn’t seem to waiver.
“The guy is a competitor,” Muschamp said. “He’s going to compete his butt off, and I’m glad he’s our quarterback.”
His world is going to change in short order. He’ll go under the knife to fix the knee. He’ll have a new position coach and coordinator after Muschamp started shuffling his staff, letting go of Dan Werner, who recruited Hilinski to Columbia.
He’ll also have a new offensive coordinator, one most likely with a background in QBs. His top target, Bryan Edwards, will depart, as will the top two rushers and the veteran center who got him the ball.
His 2,357 yards passing were the second-most ever for a Gamecocks freshman. Now he’ll get to slow down for a spell, process everything that happened, the growth from a starting season that wasn’t supposed to happen and all the lumps that came with it.
“I think he’s progressed well,” Muschamp said. “What we’re asking to do is very difficult. I’ve told him that multiple times, and there’s a lot of times we need to play much better around him. And then there’s some times Ryan will say that he needs to play better. So the bottom line is, overall, we need to improve.”
The future starts now
As the alma mater faded after the Clemson game, Hilinski went to the stands to see family, his mother and aunt, and a few others. He handed out trinkets to kids, wristbands and such, in between handing out hugs to those close to him.
As he made his final circle of the stadium, handing out high fives, there wasn’t much pace to it. He stopped to hug a cheerleader, saw a group of students raise up three fingers in honor of his brother and took a moment to play with an infant being held just on the other side of the railing.
His journey to the end zone kept being slowed — more fans, more things to hand over, more kids to stop and talk with or sign an autograph for.
It might well have taken him 15 more minutes to get halfway across the field, but team strength coach Jeff Dillman approached and summoned Hilinski inside. You can’t have the head coach’s postgame speech without the quarterback, after all.
So he ambled off toward the locker room, Dillman at his side, a freshman season, one with ups and downs, trials and tribulations, in the books, a somber mood in the building and so much future ahead of him.
This story was originally published December 5, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
