‘I felt like a football coach.’ The off-week tweaks that helped USC beat Clemson
Frank Martin grew up in the shadows of the Orange Bowl and with Larry Csonka as his idol. The Miami Dolphins were his first love. They were the neighborhood team, the bunch he rooted for and dreamed he played for each Sunday.
But when childhood aspirations went away and reality set in — “I would have been a walk-on at a Division 9 school,” he once told The State about his gridiron career — Martin forged a new path in basketball. That eventually led him to the University of South Carolina and to the Gamecocks’ rivalry with Clemson.
Of the 53-year-old’s 253 wins as a college coach, only one has come here at Littlejohn Coliseum. His third try was indeed the charm as USC outlasted Clemson, 67-54, on Sunday.
How did Martin do it? How did he get the Gamecocks to rebound from an ugly 20-point loss to Houston and turn in, arguably, its best performance of the season?
He channeled his inner Don Shula, of course.
“I felt like a football coach,” he said.
South Carolina dropped to 6-4 after the Cougars on Dec. 8 came to Colonial Life Arena, led wire-to-wire and really put in perspective the gap between the Gamecocks and a team coming off a Sweet 16 appearance. USC, a squad with NCAA Tournament aspirations of its own, was humbled and dominated. Houston was up double-digits the entire second half.
A six-day break in the schedule followed. The Carolina players used it to prep for and take semester exams while the Carolina coach did a little studying on his own.
“I could kind of self-evaluate for a couple days because we weren’t concerned with the next opponent immediately,” Martin said.
Like Shula making the Dolphins stronger off a bye week, Martin scouted the Gamecocks, made adjustments and then put it on display for 6,394 inside Littlejohn and an ESPN2 national viewing audience.
“Most math guys aren’t very smart because we deal with numbers and we don’t understand how to read very well,” said Martin, a former high school math teacher. “But I’m not the dumbest guy in the room, either. Whatever we were doing was not being very productive. So I thought we had to make some changes.”
A new starting lineup, a new point guard, new substitution patterns and offensive and defensive tweaks. Added all together, USC set a season-high for 3-point field goal percentage (44.4), forced 20-plus turnovers for the first time in a month and held an opponent under 30% shooting for the first time since Wyoming was in Columbia on Nov. 10.
“I get to re-evaluate our team (Sunday) and (Monday),” Martin said. “And then we’ll figure out sometime on Wednesday what direction we’re going in moving forward, if some of these changes need to be permanent. But I can tell you 20 minutes removed from the game, it was the first time in a while we played with some personality and I really enjoyed that.”
Bryant in, Leveque out
Martin noted this week how South Carolina hadn’t played Clemson at full-strength since its last win in the series, a 65-59 victory in Greenville in December 2015.
The three-game skid that followed didn’t include Sindarius Thornwell in 2016, saw Kory Holden exit early in 2017 and didn’t include Maik Kotsar, Justin Minaya and T.J. Moss in 2018.
Keyshawn Bryant could have been the missing piece this year, but he returned from knee surgery on Dec. 4 at UMass. Sunday, he started for the first time this season. The smaller, more athletic lineup — 6-foot-6 A.J. Lawson, 6-3 Jair Bolden, 6-6 Minaya, 6-5 Bryant (in place of 6-11 Wildens Leveque) and 6-11 Kotsar — had Carolina up 9-6 at the first media timeout. That quintet outscored Clemson’s starters by eight (51-43) and collected 26 rebounds and eight steals.
“Keyshawn Bryant is a personality,” Martin said of the sophomore who logged a season-high 29 minutes. “It doesn’t mean he played great, but the one thing with Key is he gives us personality. I had to get that on the court.”
Lawson moves to point
“Awful” was the way Martin described his point guard play following the Houston loss.
A week later, it was Lawson bringing up the ball on USC’s first possession and Bolden sprinting to a corner, a reverse approach from previous games.
Martin wanted more offensive aggression. He got that in Lawson, who thrives off downhill action. He finished with 20 points, three assists and five turnovers. Bolden’s PG style was noticeably too slow for Martin. So the coach moved the George Washington transfer off the ball and got him into more natural shooting spots, a strength of Bolden’s. He hit two huge 3s in the second half, including a spot-up swish from the left wing that put Carolina ahead by 13 with 1:51 left. That play started with Lawson driving baseline and kicking in the corner to Jermaine Couisnard, who then made the extra pass to Bolden.
“One of the reasons I moved Jair off the ball was to get him more opportunities on the perimeter,” Martin said. “Playing him at the point, with the way people were defending us, I think it was real difficult to get him shots.”
“We worked on it during finals week,” Lawson said, “about me being a point guard. It gave me more confidence in today’s game, to run point guard. I feel like I executed the plays well.”
Hannibal, Nelson off the bench. Nelson?
Of the Gamecocks’ three SC products available for the state’s biggest game of the college season, only one saw action. Jalyn McCreary, who spent his final high school year in Greenville, was a healthy scratch for the first time in 2019-20. Hartsville’s Trae Hannibal had four points, four rebounds and a steal in 16 minutes before cramping in the second half. Myrtle Beach’s Mike Green didn’t play, but his fellow walk-on did.
Yes, Nathan Nelson was among Martin’s first set of substitutions, perhaps in place of McCreary.
The 6-6 sophomore forward from Tennessee logged a meaningful four minutes.
“Nathan’s been great in practice and he deserved the right to play,” Martin said.
Hannibal, who hadn’t played more than seven minutes since the Wichita State loss on Nov. 26, became USC’s backup ball-handler, a spot previously held by Moss.
“That’s one of the thing that I re-evaluated last Sunday, Monday,” Martin said. “(Hannibal’s) got to grow up. He still think he’s in high school so sometimes he just zones out in the middle of a possession and you have no idea why.
“But he brings an athleticism, an aggression, an enthusiasm that we were lacking.”
With Hannibal on the floor, South Carolina applied frontcourt pressure in two instances in the first half before dropping into a 2-3 zone. The first time the Gamecocks got into the look, USC forced a turnover. The second time, Clemson had to call timeout to avoid a 10-second violation.
“He gave energy, confidence,” Lawson said.
Next
What: South Carolina (7-4) at No. 9 Virginia (8-1)
Where: John Paul Jones Arena in Charlottesville, Va.
When: 3 p.m., Sunday, Dec. 22
TV: ABC
Radio: 107.5 The Game in Columbia area
