Neff Giwa’s path to South Carolina football is about as far from the usual college recruiting story as it gets.
He grew up in Ireland playing rugby and soccer, then made a leap into American football that only really started taking shape after a spring clip of him working offensive line drills went viral. A little later, after visiting several major college programs in the United States, he settled on the Gamecocks. Now he’s in Columbia, sweating through summer camp and learning a sport he had never played organized before.
The size jumps off the page first: 6-foot-7, 305 pounds. That frame is going to stand out anywhere, and it certainly will when Shane Beamer takes South Carolina out of the tunnel at Williams-Brice Stadium in September.
But Giwa’s challenge is bigger than just fitting in physically. He’s essentially building a football education from the ground up.
“It was the moon to him at first,” Clements told The State. “There were probably days where he thought he had died and gone to hell, I guess.
He’s tough and he fought through it and didn’t shy away from anything. He’s eager to get better.”
Giwa signed with USC in late March and enrolled this summer. Since then, he’s been working with Clements and the offensive line on everything that comes with being new to the sport. The early focus has been the basics: stance, alignment, rules, and the little technical details that most college players have been hearing for years.
South Carolina linebacker Justin Okoronkwo, who came through the same PPI Recruits pipeline and is a native German, said Giwa has handled that part well.
“For him, it was like really in the summer, just getting the easy techniques down that get taught the first day,” Okoronkwo told The State. “…Getting in your stance, lining up, and also just learning football rules and stuff like that.
That’s where he really got pretty good at it. Now the other side he’s gotta step up a little more is like understanding the game, understanding the plays, learning the plays.”
That learning curve is steep enough on its own. Add in the move from Ireland to Columbia, and Giwa is juggling a full reset.
“It’s always been an interest of mine, but in Ireland we don’t really have a lot of infrastructure for American football like you guys have in the states,” Giwa said. “...
My mentor Brandon Collier as well. He definitely helped show me there’s more outside of rugby.
Eventually watching games and stuff like that online, just had a natural kind of connection to the sport. So that led me to do my own kind of research.”
Collier, through PPI Recruits, helped point Giwa toward the possibility of earning a scholarship and actually making the jump to college football. Once the idea became real, Giwa leaned into it.
Clements said one thing made the transition easier to believe: the way Giwa handles contact.
“The thing I saw about him in the rugby videos was, he’s not scared of contact,” Clements said. “He’ll put his face in there, he’ll lower his shoulder on somebody. He would do the stuff that you would say, ‘Hey, this guy, he doesn’t mind being physical.’”
That physicality has shown up in drills, and so has the raw athletic upside. Still, South Carolina is not pretending this is a finished product. Beamer has made it clear the staff is treating this as a development project, one where the goal is confidence first and game action later.
“We’re starting at ground zero right now,” Clements said ahead of camp. “He’s never put on a helmet, and he’s never put on shoulder pads.
Well, I’ll take that back. He had a photo shoot - that was probably the first time.
We’re going to put him in situations where he can gain confidence, make sure he’s confident in what he’s doing, how to do it, set him up for success, and just build off of it each day.”
That makes it hard to imagine Giwa getting much run on the offensive line early this season. Beamer said that would be a “big ask,” especially for someone still absorbing Football 101 in real time.
But the Gamecocks also know they’ve got something unusual on their hands. Beamer said the staff wants to find a way to use Giwa somewhere if he can help, and special teams coordinator Matthew Smiley had already floated the idea in the spring.
“Neff’s a guy because of his size and his athleticism that we need to, in my opinion and if he can help us, we need to figure out a way to get him on the field,” Beamer said. “It might not just be offensive line.
Sure, that’s where he’s working. I think that’s a big ask.
Athletically, yeah, you see him and you watch him pass set, and you do things in drills, and it’s very evident the skill set. I think asking him to be able to do it at the offensive line position, game one, that may be a reach.”
For now, though, the assignment is simpler: keep learning, keep adjusting, and keep turning a rugby player with no organized football background into a college football player. In Columbia, that process is just getting started.
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