South Carolina football goes against the trend, bringing back the huddle
It’s an archaic action on the football field, like snapping the ball to the primary runner or having wide receivers line up with a hand on the ground.
Before each play, all 11 offensive players get together. Ten face one, who announces the play, snap count, maybe a few other things. The wide receivers often depart first to get to their stations, and then the rest of the team breaks, often punctuated with a clap.
Yes, the huddle is returning to South Carolina football.
“I think the biggest thing going into a huddle this year is you get to talk to the guys a little bit before a play,” Gamecocks QB Ryan Hilinski said. “Whether it’s just a little subtle message, saying hey, let’s get after it or hey, we like got 10 plays here, or hey we got just one drive down the field let’s get to work.
“It’s just really beneficial to us and our communication as a team.”
The huddle, once a standard part of any football offense, is something new USC offensive coordinator Mike Bobo likes to have as part of his team’s operation. Yes, it can slow down the pace, but that part of the change that’s coming to the Gamecocks this season.
South Carolina hasn’t huddled since some point late in the Steve Spurrier era. His final offense, 2015, didn’t huddle. When Will Muschamp arrived, then-offensive coordinator Kurt Roper didn’t believe in huddling. Under Bryan McClendon, the team was an up-tempo spread, which delivered strong results in 2018 with a high level of passing talent but cratered with a young QB and without Deebo Samuel in 2019.
Variations of no-huddle are basically ubiquitous across college football in the modern era. They’re so common that even teams such as Navy deploy them to some extent, getting up to the line, reading the defense for a good look and then checking back with the sideline.
Bobo sees a certain level of organization that comes with a huddle, a certain soundness missing in a run-and-gun era.
“No-huddle football is very, very effective,” Bobo said. “It stresses the defense. It allows you to sometimes what I call get cheap yards,when guys don’t get lined up. But to me, football has fundamentally gone downhill. Because of playing so fast and, guys don’t play by the way that used to play all the time because of no huddle, In my opinion. The finer points of blocking have going down. The finer points of tackling have gone down.”
A portion of that last point caught some heat on social media, with writers from the college and pro football worlds cracking on the idea of “cheap yards.”
That dovetails into the narrative that had dogged Muschamp teams since his early days at Florida: that he is a defensive coach who prefers offenses that are on the plodding side in a game that’s rapidly speeding up.
The issue for South Carolina is that it came off 2019 looking to change, and there wasn’t really a change that could make the offense any faster. The Gamecocks managed to rank higher than almost three-fourths of the teams in the sport in plays per game despite around a third of its drives against FBS opponents ending in three and outs (one metric that measured pace put South Carolina in the top 10).
In the end, the Gamecocks are in some way proof that going up-tempo won’t solve an offense’s problems.
So as it looks to try to turn around from last season’s struggles, South Carolina is going in a different direction, not only from 2019, but from the majority of the sport.
That’s not to say the Gamecocks won’t go fast at times. Every offense has no-huddle elements and Bobo’s will too as they plan to shift tempos to occasionally catch defenses off balance. But they’re bringing something back, connecting to some of the old ways of doing things, letting a quarterback make little changes, emphasizing details or playing a role of coach on the field..
“As a quarterback, I always thought it was good sometimes to get in the huddle too,” Bobo said. “Now you’re setting up here, you’re setting the tone for that drive, you’re setting the tone for that plan, you’re giving little reminders that sometimes don’t get given when you’re in a no huddle.”
This story was originally published September 6, 2020 at 8:22 AM.
