Gamecocks test new technology for 2024 in spring football game

COLUMBIA — South Carolina was already fiddling with it, preparing for the eventuality that it would come, and probably soon. So when the NCAA officially approved it on Friday, the Gamecocks had the materials and enough of a head start so they’d feel comfortable doing it on Saturday during the spring game.

“We’ve been doing that, kind of, off and on all spring; we didn’t do it every single practice but we did it some of the practices,” coach Shane Beamer said. “But I definitely wanted to do it tonight just because the next time we’re in that big a crowd, we’ll be doing it for real in August.”

Beamer and his coaches were talking to players through communication lines set up in their helmets. They were (briefly) brandishing tablets on the sideline to point out what happened on the previous play.

With both pieces of technology longtime staples in the NFL, college football will finally adopt the practices starting in the 2024 season. It’s not a knee-jerk reaction to the sign-stealing scandal that hung over Michigan’s national championship season last year; it’s more of a way to get with the times, especially when sign-stealing has been a topic for the past decade and some South Carolina high schools have been using it for years.

But it also won’t eliminate sign-stealing. The intent is to make it more difficult and embrace the technology that players can use at the next level, should they get there.

“We’ve done the headset in some of the practices just to get used to hearing it. Just being able to get used to the noise in the background, the band, the fans, all that,” Beamer said. “The tablets, I don’t know. We had a bunch of them down there. I told the coaches, ‘Just get used to, even if it’s nothing to really look at, but just get your guys on the sidelines after each series and just kind of go through something so they are used to seeing that also.’”

Each team will be allowed to have one player on the field at a time wearing in-helmet communication, which will be signaled to the officials by a green dot sticker. Teams can have up to 10 players eligible for the helmets per game, which must be submitted to the conference office beforehand.