Scott has followed South Carolina athletics for over 40 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective. He writes a weekly newsletter (this email) year-round and a column during football season that's published each Monday on GamecockCentral.com.
Scott Davis: Back to the Future for South Carolina Offense
Five years ago this month, Gamecock fans everywhere were clamoring for new coach Shane Beamer to hire an offensive whiz kid.
We wanted a mastermind, a guy with a rowdy and rambunctious offensive scheme that was based on exploiting mismatches in the Wild West that is college football.
After a half-decade of a conservative, ball-control, "run first, ask questions later" approach during the Will Muschamp Era, we wanted someone who could actually strike fear in SEC defensive coordinators the way that Steve Spurrier's offenses had done. And Beamer delivered that guy.
It just took him five years, three offensive coordinators, and a disappointing 4-8 season to do it.
Kendal Briles was announced as South Carolina's new offensive coordinator on Thursday, and he'll bring an impressive resume of steadily improving the offenses under his leadership when he arrives in Columbia from TCU. Briles got his start coaching under his legendary father, Art, at Baylor, where the offense was annually one of the best in the country and quarterback Robert Griffin III collected a Heisman Trophy.
The Briles offenses – both those of father and son – are known for being the type of intense, frenetic college-style attacks that are designed to put relentless pressure on a defense. Dual-threat quarterbacks often thrive amidst this organized chaos. What's more, the offenses under Kendal Briles have featured both high-quality running games and passing attacks (before transferring to South Carolina, Rocket Sanders ran wild for Briles at Arkansas).
When you watch football in the free-wheeling Big 12, you're often watching this type of football – a brand of entertaining offense that is designed to keep the chains moving and light up the scoreboard – and since the 2010s, it has been widely accepted that this offensive approach represented the present and the future of college football.
And yet, since Spurrier retired, South Carolina fans have long felt they were watching an offense that was stuck in the past.
Can Briles, at last, take this offense back to the future?
Bold Statement
For much of my lifetime as a South Carolina fan, a common lament amongst Gamecock supporters has been that the program never quite put its full weight into hiring the very best staff members available.
When a coordinator position would come open at South Carolina, it wasn't unusual to see an inexperienced staff member given an opportunity to take a crack at it. Friends and pals of the head coach were often tabbed and retained in important roles year after year, even if their units weren't exactly delivering the goods.
We'd watch as our peers around the SEC maintained a "take no prisoners" attitude when it came to coordinator hires, throwing money at superstar candidates and ensuring that their head coaches had every last staff member they needed to go win a national championship. Meanwhile, South Carolina was often viewed as a place where a Band-Aid might be applied to an open wound.
But after hiring three consecutive offensive coordinators who underwhelmed Gamecock fans both with their resumes and with the production of their units, Beamer appears to have gotten the message that it was time for a bold statement.
And after overseeing a 4-8 free-fall from preseason Top 15 team to one of the SEC's most disappointing squads, he had little choice but to make one. It might not have necessarily been Hail Mary time for the Beamer regime in Columbia, but it's late in the fourth quarter, and the clock is ticking.
Had Briles been hired back in December 2020, Gamecock fans would have rejoiced.
As 2025 closes, we're hoping it's not too late to inject some of that Big 12 brashness into an SEC offense.
A Few Points More
It's difficult not to do the math and ponder what might've been.
Had South Carolina's offense just been serviceable in 2025 – not even one of the SEC's best, just not one of the very worst SEC offenses in recent memory – this now concluded season would almost certainly still be alive and rolling on into a decent bowl game. Indeed, we're probably talking about a 7- or 8-win team with an offense that collected just a couple of points more per contest, and the perception of Beamer's program both locally and nationally would be almost 180 degrees from where it stands at present.
It really was that close.
Whether Briles succeeds at South Carolina or not, this was the type of dramatic offseason move that absolutely had to be made following a campaign that left Gamecock fans as dispirited and disillusioned as they've been since Spurrier walked away from the program at midseason in 2015.
Say what you will about him, but Kendal Briles is a real, live, experienced college football offensive coordinator. And his offenses have always been entertaining – which just isn't a word you can use to describe South Carolina offenses over the last decade.
We'll see if he's able to make it work in a conference where every single defense is stocked with elite athletes. But no matter what, Gamecock fans won't have to spend another fall complaining about NFL coordinators with complicated playbooks who delivered a product that was rarely engaging or compelling to watch.
Like Beamer (and the now departed Mike Shula), Briles carries the weight of being the son of a legend. As Shula and Skip Holtz and Derek Dooley and a host of others have proven, being the son of a legend is no guarantee of success.
But Kendal Briles has already compiled a sterling track record of success on his own. Now he'll get a chance to resurrect an offense that has largely been in hiding for a decade.
If he can do it, he'll be a legend himself in the Palmetto State.
And so will his head coach.
Tell me how you're feeling about the hire by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com. (Please do not reply to this email.)
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