Before Kendal Briles ever called a play at South Carolina, Jeremiah Donati already had a feel for what the Gamecocks were bringing in.
Donati had been the athletic director at TCU when the Horned Frogs hired Briles to run their offense in 2023. He spent two football seasons with him there before taking over at South Carolina, and the two ended up back in the same building in Columbia this year.
Briles was brought in to fix an offense that had become the SEC’s punching bag under former coordinator Mike Shula. Donati described him at SEC Meetings this summer with a line that now feels pretty revealing.
“He’s got a little swagger to him,” Donati told The State in May about Briles. “He’s definitely got an identity to him, and I think he relates to the players really well.”
Months later, after six games, Shane Beamer sounded like he was reading from the same script without meaning to. When asked about Briles’ effect on the offense, the South Carolina coach pointed straight to the tone he’s brought.
“Just the confidence and the swagger that the whole team has in the offense because of him,” Beamer said of Briles.
At the halfway mark of the season, South Carolina is 3-3 overall and 1-3 in the SEC, but the offense is no longer the problem it was a year ago. Against SEC opponents, the Gamecocks are averaging 31 points per game, good for No. 7 in the league, and their ground game is rolling at 232.3 yards per game, which ranks No. 10 nationally.
That’s a massive jump from last season, when South Carolina was scoring a little over 18 points per SEC game and running for roughly 111 yards against all opponents.
The numbers tell one story. The feel around the offense tells another.
Even after three straight SEC losses, Briles didn’t become the easy target. That’s not the kind of sentence you usually write in this sport, especially in the middle of a season when frustration tends to spill fast.
The reason is simple enough: the offense has looked far better than the results showed. During that three-game losing streak, South Carolina was still averaging almost 29 points per game. The breakdowns were more about what the players did than what was drawn up.
LaNorris Sellers threw two interceptions against Mississippi State that the Gamecocks could not afford. He also had a pick-6 against Alabama. Against Kentucky, South Carolina coughed up the ball twice and blew a critical fourth down when tight end Maurice Brown went off script and tried to bounce outside instead of following the design straight ahead.
And then there have been the drops. Sellers has had 21 passes dropped this season, more than any quarterback in the country, according to Pro Football Focus.
That kind of thing changes everything. It changes drives, numbers, confidence, maybe even the record.
Briles also had to handle Sellers carefully as the struggles mounted and backup Cutter Woods started getting more first-team reps.
“He knew he needed to play better, and just like any other position, there’s competition,” Briles said last week. “And if you don’t play to the standard, then you don’t play as much.”
Then came last Saturday at No. 16 Florida, where the offense finally got a clean run. South Carolina won 38-19, piled up nearly 400 total yards, averaged more than 12 yards per completion and converted 10 of 16 third downs.
That was the version of Briles’ offense the Gamecocks came for.
“Kendal was a stud today,” Beamer said after the Florida game. “I thought he called a great game.
He was aggressive. We never took our foot off the gas pedal, and we responded.”
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