Dec. 5, 2012

The Gamecocks host Jacksonville on Friday evening at 7 p.m. in a non-conference contest. The game is slated to be broadcast by SportSouth.

Opening Statement
We had two opportunities to become bowl eligible last week and we messed that up. We’ll try to work a little harder this week and see if we can continue to make progress.

On turnovers….
It’s embarrassing. I wish I could use another word. We’ve lost three games and all three games have basically been lost with our inability to play offense. You know how we work as a staff, we watch the games we play individually not collectively. I don’t want everyone to share the same opinion of the film. Then we visit and everyone has their own opinion as to what we did well and what we did wrong. We’ve been together for a while now and know each other well. We’re able to be brutally honest with one another. The problem with our team and we are all in agreement about how embarrassingly bad we’ve been on offense. We’ve got to fix that. Our team defense has not been great, but it is good enough to win with. The problem is, we are giving teams so many free points because of our inability to play offense. Our offense is so bad for numerous reasons. It’s too long to sit here and explain right now. It deflates us. It brings a negative tone. We play with such an individual frame of mind on offense. We don’t pass, we don’t screen, we don’t know the concepts that we need to play with and those things fall on my plate. Those are all coaching things. We have to do a better job of teaching, demanding and seeing them execute. The lack of all of those things creates a negative tone on offense, which carries a negative tone for how we play. That’s something that has got to be fixed.

On putting the best five players on the court…
My job is to play the guys who are best prepared to win the game in front of us. As they continue to to try to understand me as their coach and as I continue to try to understand them as a players, there is obviously going to be some things that change. You’ll find that once I trust in a player, I usually keep throwing them out there. They take the bull by the horns and keep that job. But, I also believe in competition. If guys don’t do their jobs everyday, I don’t see why they should keep their job.

On implementing his offensive scheme…
I think anytime you’re in education you get frustrated. As a teacher you have to understand that you have to remove that emotion when you feel it or you can’t do your job well enough to get people to understand. This is the most vanilla we’ve been on offense in my six years as a head coach, and probably going back 16 years as a high school. We’re doing that on purpose. What we’re doing is so different from what we were doing before I’m not saying that our way is right and what they were doing before was wrong. It’s just different. We’re really vanilla. That does get frustrating sometimes.

On Jacksonviile…
They are as aggressive and physical as can be. They play really hard. They remind me of Elon a little bit. Don’t shoot the ball as well as Elon’s guards, but they play with the same physicality. Elon was a physical team. They play with the same physicality. They are going to come in her and punch us in the mouth and see if we can punch back. That’s how they play. Cliff Warren has been there, I want to say, six or seven years. Little by little he has been building that program. They are a team that has an identity. When you watch them on tape, you see the same thing every time. That’s what we’re striving to become, a team with an identity. We talk about that and finding our personality. Let’s figure out who we are and do that everyday and do it a little bit better every single day.