The hopes and dreams of the South Carolina football program may rest in the hands of Mike Bobo.

While that may be a difficult ask of many coaches, there aren’t many assistants in the Southeastern Conference that have the experience or have achieved the level of success Bobo has during his time in the nation’s most challenging football conference.

During his first media availability of South Carolina’s ongoing training camp, the Gamecock offensive coordinator was asked about the challenge of discovering an offensive identity heading into the season.

“I basically address this question, with our team in the first meeting. I said that’s one of our objectives in this camp is to find our identity,” Bobo said on Thursday. “I have an idea of what I think we’re going to become, but at the end of the day, I gotta let it play out in practice. And that goes back to what personnel group are we most productive in? Now you’re going to see all of it from us. But what are we going to be, you know, major in?

“Are we going to major in 11 personnel? Are we gonna major in 12 personnel? Are we going to major in two back? I’ve done all of that in my career offensively, different staffs in different stops, but it’s always something that you got to figure out, offensively. It is hard it is, I got an idea but we got to go out there, we got to put on the pads and I got to see some things with the guys in pads. See some of these young guys, and now with the injury with MarShawn, the new running back, White coming into the fold and some of these other guys, we got to see what they can do.”

Finding an identity may take some time but the good news is, the offense is mostly installed thanks to the added offseason practices the NCAA permitted teams to utilize this summer.

Those practices were huge, according to Bobo, and have led to 75-80 percent of his offense being installed heading into camp.

“I will go back to what the NCAA allowed us to do in the summer – was definitely beneficial for us to install our offense,” Bobo added. “I would say probably 75- 80 percent of our offense has been installed and now we got to see what direction we’re gonna go. There are some nuances within that installation of things you can do are certain things that we haven’t gotten to, but the nuts and bolts of it is in. Now we’ve got to go out and practice it.”

The challenge now in Columbia during training camp is finding out just how much of his playbook the team can comfortably run on the field in Year 1.

“Now we’ve got to, as a coach, we’ve had a lot of walkthroughs, a lot of OTAs, kinda wanting to go to that next step, but I got to realize, have we mastered some of the finer points of route running? These certain routes I want to run? No, the answer’s no,” Bobo explained. “So I got to be patient and realized that we still got over a month before we play our first game. That’s an eternity in football.

“I might understand it and feel good about where our coaches are, but at the end of the day, it’s what your kids know. What do they feel comfortable going to the game executing? If they’re not comfortable with it or don’t understand it, then the chances of them play it fast and having success is not very high.”