South Carolina got creative on offense in Week 1. Are more tricks on the way?
Midway through the third quarter of South Carolina’s season opener, burly 230-pound tight end Jaheim Bell lined up at fullback, took the football and zoomed 65 yards into Eastern Illinois’ end zone.
The play won’t show up in the box score — negated by an offensive holding penalty. But in USC’s 46-0 trouncing of EIU, Bell’s mad sprint toward the end zone was one of the more exhilarating and eye-popping examples of how creative offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield can be.
Had Bell’s run counted, he would’ve finished second on the Gamecocks that night with 81 rushing yards — despite lining up primarily at tight end.
“I got more to show to the rest of my coaches and the fans,” Bell would say after the game, unable to hold back a smile. “I ain’t done yet. That’s just the start.”
There’s a sense that Satterfield, USC’s first-year coordinator, is only getting started, too. With the Gamecocks facing a much stiffer matchup on the road at East Carolina on Saturday, USC might have no choice but to dip deeper into the playbook.
When head coach Shane Beamer introduced Satterfield in January, both coaches spoke about concocting an offense that borrows from Lincoln Riley’s Oklahoma system and Joe Brady’s offense with LSU and the Carolina Panthers. Satterfield promised to sculpt the offense around South Carolina’s playmakers, creating mismatches with them and getting them the ball in space.
Satterfield’s creativity was apparent in the opening minutes of USC’s first game. Without the star power of a Deebo Samuel, Bryan Edwards or Shi Smith in the receiving room, Satterfield used personnel packages that featured multiple tight ends and running backs lined up in a variety of ways.
On the first play of USC’s second drive, shifty freshman tailback Juju McDowell lined up at slot receiver and wide receiver Dakareon Joyner lined up at quarterback, with running back MarShawn Lloyd next to him in the backfield. On the play, Joyner faked a jet sweep hand-off to McDowell then tucked the ball and ran for a short gain. Later in the drive, Bell lined up at tight end and carried the ball on an end-around, hurdling over an EIU defender.
“(Satterfield) knows we have a really good skill group, and he wants to be able to use every bit of us,” Lloyd said. “I feel like him using us and putting us in different places is making us versatile. It’s amazing. I feel like that’s a great thing for a lot of us young guys, as well as the older guys.”
Beamer and Satterfield said often throughout the spring and summer that tight ends would factor prominently into the offense, and they held true to their word in Week 1 — particularly in the red zone. The team’s first touchdown of the season went to tight end Nick Muse, on a play in which Muse lined up in a bunch formation with two other tight ends. All three ran routes, while tailback ZaQuandre White lined up at wide receiver next to Josh Vann. The Gamecocks used three-tight end sets throughout much of the night.
On the team’s second red zone trip, 6-foot-7 tight end E.J. Jenkins lined up detached from the offensive line at receiver, motioned toward the other side of the line, then reversed course, lined up at tight end and nearly caught a touchdown pass that quarterback Zeb Noland threw just a touch too high.
Those kinds of plays with pre-snap motions and unique personnel groupings require an extra degree of discipline to execute on game day compared with a standard halfback dive up the gut. But Satterfield said he’s comfortable calling those plays because he knows his players understand them on an intellectual level.
“You’ve got to have football guys in those positions, guys that understand football and can see what you’re saying and what you’re trying to portray and then go to be able to execute it,” Satterfield said. “The other thing is just through repetition. Those guys have been doing that all summer, all training camp, so it wasn’t anything that we threw new on them last week.
“But those are all smart kids and have multi skill sets.”
Satterfield especially praised Joyner, who has practiced at both wide receiver and quarterback for the Gamecocks. Joyner ran a handful of plays at quarterback against EIU, and Satterfield said “his role has to continue to grow at the quarterback position moving forward.”
With the potential return of quarterback Luke Doty as soon as this Saturday, Satterfield could toy with the quarterback position even more. He has talked about packages with more than one quarterback on the field, and it’s worth nothing that Doty — much like Joyner — also worked as a receiver in practice last season.
“I think when you have that kind of creativity, it makes it a lot of fun,” Doty said of Satterfield’s offense. “I don’t think there’s too much difficulty to it, especially when you’re able to just go out there and not not think about much, but go out there and do your job and execute. And the way that he designs plays and works around the guys that we do have and athletes that we have, just being able to get all of them involved in stuff — that was awesome to see.
“... We’re excited to continue to move forward. And we’re definitely going to have a lot of other good stuff for you.”
