What ails USC offense? LaNorris Sellers, passing game sputter against LSU
LaNorris Sellers was touted nationally as a Heisman Trophy contender before the 2025 football season began. Through six games, he hasn’t played to that standard.
While there have been flashes of high-caliber play here and there, nothing has been sustained week to week. That much was evident Saturday night.
South Carolina lost 20-10 to No. 11 LSU inside Tiger Stadium. Sellers finished with 124 passing yards and an interception in the loss. He was 15 for 27 through the air (a season-low 57%) with 19 yards on the ground, and was sacked five times.
It was one of his worst performances of the season.
“Thought he battled his rear end off,” South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer said. “... He’ll be the first to tell you he missed some throws, I’m sure he’d like to have some plays back. Kid is tough as hell and made a lot of plays for us.”
Sellers and the rest of the South Carolina offense as a whole had ample opportunities to walk out of Death Valley with an upset win, but self-inflicted mistakes doomed the Gamecocks (3-3, 1-3 SEC). The South Carolina offense was flagged for 10 penalties , seven of which came before the snap.
And many of the penalties came at costly times, like a false start and an intentional grounding penalty on back-to-back plays that took the Gamecocks from 1st-and-10 on the LSU 27 to 2nd-and-28 on the LSU 45-yard line.
“Super frustrating,” Sellers said of the penalties. “We’re driving the ball down the field, get to the red zone, or get a chance to score and someone gets a penalty, or something like that happens. Just something we’ve got to continue to work on to get better at.”
Sellers had two turnovers on the night: a fumble on the first play of the game and an interception in the second quarter. The interception was his second of the year and his first since the Vanderbilt game.
The Gamecocks’ quarterback was flagged for two costly intentional grounding penalties when he was trying to avoid a sack.
“I really don’t know, to be honest,” Sellers said when asked about the intentional groundings. “I didn’t want to take another sack, obviously. It was like two or three guys in my face. Obviously I could run, scramble more. I think I just got to get out the pocket.”
Some of Sellers’ performance (and the offense’s, for that matter) can be attributed to the shifting offensive line. South Carolina was already without Cason Henry, Nolan Hay and Markee Anderson, then lost Shedrick Sarratt to an injury in the game. And an ineffective Rodney Newsom Jr. was replaced at center by Boaz Stanley.
Beamer attributed some, but not all, of South Carolina’s lack of success in the passing game to the offensive line. Though the run game contributed almost 200 yards, USC only had three pass plays of 15 or more yards — with a 20-yard pass to Nyck Harbor the longest completion of the night.
“LaNorris will tell you he missed some throws and then certainly protection,” Beamer said. “But there’s no question about it, we’ve gotta be able to throw the ball down the field better and take our shots.”
Beamer also said some of it came down to play from the receivers. He used a failed fourth-down conversion attempt late in the game — where Sellers and a smothered Vandrevius Jacobs failed to connect — as an example.
“Receivers would tell you we knew we were going to get man coverage,” Beamer said. “That’s what they play. That fourth down that we went for, the play to Dre on the sideline, they’re man to man coverage they brought pressure, it was man to man across the board and their guy won and we didn’t. There’s some of that. We’ve gotta win our one-on-ones a little bit better.”
Sellers has now thrown for 1,010 yards, four touchdowns and two interceptions through six games this season. Through his first six games last year, he was at 968 yards passing with five touchdowns and four interceptions. Both his completion percentage (64% this year, 63% last year) and efficiency rating (146.5 this year, 127 last year) are up.
Statistically speaking, there’s been improvement. But Sellers has looked more like a middle-of-the-pack SEC quarterback than a Heisman candidate through six games.
