South Carolina’s Size Dilemma: Why Height Alone Isn’t the Answer for the Gamecocks
COLUMBIA - If you’ve been watching South Carolina basketball lately, you’ve seen the same thing opponents have: a frontcourt that’s giving up too much inside. Florida and LSU didn’t just beat the Gamecocks last week - they went straight at their biggest weakness and exposed it in back-to-back games. The strategy was simple: feed the post, let the bigs go to work, and watch South Carolina struggle to keep up.
Against Florida, it was a mismatch from the jump. The Gators dominated the paint so thoroughly that it felt like even dropping in a Hall of Fame center wouldn’t have changed the outcome.
LSU was a tighter contest - an overtime loss - but the Tigers still edged USC in rebounding and outscored them by six in the paint. The pattern was clear: South Carolina was getting outmuscled and outleaped, and not by accident.
Which brings us to the question that’s been floating around since that LSU game: Why not play the seven-footers?
South Carolina has two of them on the roster - Christ Essandoko and Jordan Butler - and neither saw the floor against LSU. It’s a head-scratcher on the surface. When you’re getting punished inside, wouldn’t it make sense to counter with size?
But for those who’ve followed this team closely, the answer isn’t just about height. It’s about fit, development, and the way head coach Lamont Paris wants this team to play.
Let’s start with Butler. He’s in his second year at USC and third in college overall, having started at Missouri.
He’s seen the court in short bursts - just over four minutes against Florida and under two against Texas A&M - and hasn’t scored in a game since Dec. 30 against Albany. That’s over a month without a bucket.
Essandoko has seen slightly more action, logging over six minutes against Florida and a combined nine minutes in recent SEC games against Auburn and Arkansas. He’s managed just two field goals across nine conference games.
Both players have intriguing skill sets. They’re not your traditional back-to-the-basket bigs.
They can step out and shoot the three, and in some ways, they prefer to. That’s part of the puzzle here - they don’t play like classic post presences.
On defense, they can block shots, but Paris’s defensive system doesn’t isolate them in the paint in a way that maximizes their size. Between them, they’ve registered just four blocks this season.
Paris has spoken about Butler’s agility - a rare trait for a seven-footer - and the potential he flashes in practice. But turning flashes into consistent production has been the challenge.
“He’s very agile, incredibly agile,” Paris said earlier this season. “So I said, ‘OK, now you’ve shown us that you can do that, right? So stop being stingy and give that to us all the time.’”
Essandoko’s development has been slowed by circumstances beyond the court. He returned to France over the summer and had some difficulty getting back to the U.S., which cost him valuable offseason work with the team. Since then, nagging injuries and inconsistent play have kept him from carving out a spot in the rotation.
And that’s the reality right now: Paris has locked in on his core group, and neither big man has done enough to break through. Could that change with nine regular-season games left?
Sure. But it would take a significant shift - not just in Paris’s philosophy, but in what Butler and Essandoko bring when they’re on the floor.
Because here’s the thing: it’s not just about size. Paris made that clear when asked about the team’s struggles inside.
“I just don’t think it is a size thing, by and large,” he said. “Instances?
Absolutely. Overall?
I don’t think so. I think it’s more competitiveness, physicality, getting after it.
I think it’s way more of that than just size. Otherwise, the tallest team would just win, usually, right?”
And he’s not wrong. Basketball isn’t a height contest - it’s about how you use it.
Right now, South Carolina’s smaller, quicker lineup is designed to push the pace, rely on guard play, and use forwards like Elijah Strong to create mismatches. It’s a system that sacrifices size for speed and spacing.
But when that system runs into dominant post play - like it did against Florida and LSU - the trade-off becomes painfully obvious.
So where does that leave the Gamecocks? In a tough spot.
The current formula isn’t holding up against physical frontcourts, but the alternatives haven’t proven they can tip the scale, either. For now, Butler and Essandoko remain on the outside of the rotation, waiting for an opportunity - or a necessity - to force a change.
Hope is a part of the equation. But as the season winds down, South Carolina needs more than hope.
They need answers in the paint. And whether those answers come from within the current rotation or from a pair of seven-footers waiting in the wings, time is running out to find them.