South Carolina wide receiver group ready to ‘win as receivers’ in 2025

South Carolina brought in six freshman wide receivers during the 2025 recruiting cycle, seven if you include walk-on Jackson Repp.

When you mix a group of young, eager-to-learn freshmen with returning wideouts like Mazeo Bennett and Nyck Harbor, a recipe for success opens up for the Gamecocks’ passing game.

“First of all, the group is becoming closer as a unit,” offensive coordinator Mike Shula said last Wednesday. “In regards to just kind of, hey, we’re going to be in this together. We need to win. We need help for this football team to win as receivers.”

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South Carolina has enough talent between the two groups that Shula doesn’t know how many might even play in a game.

“I kind of leave that up to Coach (Mike) Furrey a little bit. But I do think that more so than maybe what we thought,” Shula said. “Yes, on paper, everyone, you know, they all come in, you got six guys coming in, but, like, ‘Okay, there’s six freshmen. They’ll probably be one or two.’ No, I mean, like you said, there’s going to be multiple guys.”

With that much talent around, head coach Shane Beamer does a good job of making sure everyone knows just because you start the season low on the depth chart, it doesn’t mean you’ll end the season there.

“And he’s done that in the past,” Shula said. “He showed clips to the team of how guys who have started out on the scout team, and then halfway through the season, they were starting. So I think there’s going to be more (freshmen) than we thought on the field.”

South Carolina’s six freshmen wideouts include Donovan Murph, Jordan Gidron, Malik Clark, Jayden Sellers, Brian Rowe Jr and Lex Cyrus. Of the group, Sellers is the only one who didn’t rank as a four-star prospect out of high school.

Shula said while he hasn’t been around a lot of young guys coming out of high school in a long time, the Gamecocks’ crop of freshmen is a mature group.

“And I think the older guys that are here, they’ve done a really good job of embracing the fact that there’s younger guys that are going to help us and that are going to be on the field,” Shula said. “So it’s a group that’s pulled together, and I think they’ve done some really good things. Now we’ve got to be consistent.”

The Gamecocks’ group of “older guys” isn’t that old either. While guys like Harbor and Jared Brown return for their junior and senior seasons, the room of “veterans” also includes guys like Bennett and Vandrevius Jacobs. Bennett returns for his sophomore season, while Jacobs is back for his redshirt sophomore season.

The returning wide receivers are also still learning, too. Harbor, who played tight end and defensive end in high school, enters his third year ever playing the position.

“He’s just getting more comfortable, just getting more fluent, just flowing through things a lot better,” quarterback LaNorris Sellers said. “I think having this spring, because he had a couple of years, helped him a lot.”

Having six freshmen puts guys like Bennett in situations to take on leadership roles early in their careers.

“I feel like it’s my job, because I was just in their shoes last year, to just let them know how the game goes,” Bennett said. “… Those young guys, they’re eager to learn more. They don’t think that they got it, they’re eager to learn, they’re eager to work every day.”

While the older group mentors the freshmen, the younger group pushes the returning wide receivers to be better.

“There is a lot of talent that just came into this room,” Brown said in early August. “They come to practice (and) work hard every day. … I love to see it.”

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