The USC football team is preparing for another game-type scrimmage Saturday, and coach Will Muschamp is looking for continued improvement throughout his team. He’s also looking to settle a few starting jobs, such as quarterback, running back and one offensive tackle. The Gamecocks held their 16th camp practice Thursday morning. Following practice, Muschamp offered up these comments to USC’s Steve Fink about the day and the kind of day he’s looking forward to on Saturday.
“We got a lot accomplished. We worked on a lot of protections and pressures in ‘loose down’ situations, one-minute, third-down, a lot of ‘move the ball,’ a lot of situational things that came up. We used crowd noise, which we’ve used the previous two days. It’s good for our guys to continue to work with crowd noise going on. I don’t know how it’s going to be as far as stadiums are concerned. I’m sure on the road there will be some crowd noise pumped in for our offense until the center puts his hand on the ball when you’re supposed to turn it off. I thought we had a decent work day. A big day Saturday – a big evaluation day on Saturday. Improvement. Improvement across the ball. I told the guys improvement individually and then collectively as a team. We’ve got to continue to improve and get better. I told the guys at this point in camp and I think I’ve said it before – you either are making progress or excuses. You are either getting better or there’s a reason why you’re not and normally you look in a mirror when that happens. There will be some thud involved and some live scrimmage tackling involved, but not as much as the first two (scrimmages). The first two were all live. We need to make sure we hit some situations with our team. But there will be a lot of ‘move the ball’ with our coaches off the field. We’ll treat it as another game day opportunity with a kickoff at noon.”
After practice, interviews were conducted by USC staff with running backs coach Des Kitchings and linebackers coach Rod Wilson and were provided to the media.
