Familiar Foes: The Relationship Between Tennessee and South Carolina's Coaching Staffs
There’s typically six degrees of separation between coaching staffs in the SEC and that’s even less for the South Carolina Gamecocks and Tennessee Volunteers.
USC offensive coordinator Mike Bobo talked earlier this week about how the close the two coaching staffs are.
“We played against [Jeremy Pruitt] when I was at Colorado State when he was that he was at Alabama and then the year there at the University of Georgia, Jeremy cross paths and went against each other,” he said. “There's obviously familiarity, we lived in the same neighborhood him Coach Pruitt and Coach [Will] Friend we all lived in the same neighborhood all families are close. Went on summer visit vacation this summer with Coach Friend and his family so that's part of the business. You develop relationships, but I can promise you both of us on both sides want to go out and put our best foot forward.”
As close as he is to members of the Tennessee staff, Bobo said there are limitations to how much of the familiarity can be of use.
“You know there's going to be things that they look at that we did during that time together and what we obviously did at Colorado State,” he said. “It’s going to be things that I'm going to look at the Jeremy did at the University of Georgia, that he did it Alabama now he's doing it Tennessee, but at the same time you gotta be careful that you don't chase too many ghosts. You can't let you know those ghosts sometimes dictate what you want to do offensively. You want to try to dictate to the defense what you want to do and there's going to be some things that he's going to do that we're going to have to make some adjustments and talk through on the sideline and hopefully vice versa.”
Kickoff is at 7:30 p.m. at Williams-Brice Stadium.