Muschamp, USC deliver on long-ago recruiting promise despite ‘a lot of negativity’
It took less than 20 seconds for Will Muschamp to tap into it Wednesday.
It’s the topic that in some ways defined South Carolina’s fall of 2019 on the recruiting trail. It linked back to a promise Muschamp made long ago, and it displayed the depth of the skill-set he puts an inordinate amount of pride in.
And it didn’t take long for him to dig in on something key: Negativity.
“When you don’t have the year you want to have, you deal with a lot on the recruiting trail,” Muschamp said, “and about 90% of it’s not true (from) some of our lovely competitors. ... Our staff did a fantastic job of keeping these guys together. We faced a lot of negativity outside of our campus, some on our campus.”
In facing that, Muschamp and his staff delivered on a promise from four years ago — and delivered in a notable way.
On the day he was introduced in Columbia in 2015, Muschamp placed a strong emphasis on what recruiting was going to mean, not unlike his boss Nick Saban presciently did at the start of his Alabama tenure. Muschamp promised to sell ice to Eskimos and pointed to his wife as the top recruit he ever landed.
Yet the job he did this year was arguably his best in garnet and black.
His first class was a transition group from the Steve Spurrier era. His second was his first full class, one built when the team was still riding the potential of a new coach. The next two groups came together around the next step the team seemed to be taking with a 9-4 finish in 2018.
But this one ... this one is different.
This class was mostly built in the aftermath of the 2018 season, one where the team fell short of some lofty expectations and finished with a dud in the Belk Bowl. That was looking ahead to a 2019 season where 7-5 facing a brutal schedule would have been considered a pretty big success.
Instead came the 4-8 year where most everything outside of one afternoon in Athens, Georgia seemed to break wrong.
Yet South Carolina’s recruiting class didn’t atrophy, adding a massive coup in five-star Jordan Burch to close things out Wednesday.
Usually 4-8 campaigns hit schools with recruits backing off their commitments. The Gamecocks have had some high-profile pieces in there for a long time, including the likes of Maryland tailback MarShawn Lloyd, a five-star in come circles.
The only decommit that happened in the course of the year was a 2021 running back. Tennessee defensive lineman Reggie Grimes, a player with ridiculous potential and developing to do, ultimately committed to Oklahoma over the Gamecocks in the midst of some questions around the coaching staff’s future.
USC closed on a top-400 guy in tight end Jaheim Bell and then Burch, who had yet to sign his National Letter of Intent at the time of the press conference.
All told, that’s not much damage done by back-to-back seasons that left fans with a sour taste.
That’s a staff getting it done on the recruiting trail, and a credit to the players they had committed.
“I think I visited 10 or so home visit situations in December,” Muschamp said. “And I walked out of every one of them saying, ‘There’s (the) reason why he’s a good kid. He’s got great parents. He’s got great support. He’s got great people around you that are helping and make good decisions.’ ... It says a lot about the character of the young men, but also their support system at home.”
South Carolina’s class will almost assuredly finish in the top 20, maybe around 15 after the Burch addition. It ended the day with 17 signed.
Muschamp will tell you these rankings don’t mean much, and the difference between 16th or 17th or 18th probably doesn’t. But staying near that level despite all the tumult? That’s the job well done here.
The next steps involve wrapping things in February in the next signing period, as there are a few moving pieces and some specialists who might well bump to next class (not to mention possible grad transfers). The accelerated recruiting calendar means the challenges of the past season might make building the 2021 class more challenging, but that’s a task for a seasoned recruiting staff going forward.
But they way they held all this together, especially with everything that transpired, they’ll probably have the chance to pull that off too.
“We kind of have a policy around here that we’re going to promote the University of South Carolina,” Muschamp said. “I don’t know how other teams run their program, nor do I care. I don’t know what their depth chart looks like, I don’t know what they do schematically. I may know, but I’m not going to talk about what people do.
“I learned a lot about the stuff I already knew about the people around us, so it’s been an interesting, interesting December, I can assure you that.”
This story was originally published December 18, 2019 at 6:39 PM with the headline "Muschamp, USC deliver on long-ago recruiting promise despite ‘a lot of negativity’."
