What Jake Bentley learned going through a rocky 2018 season
South Carolina quarterback Jake Bentley wasn’t one to delve too deep into his own ups and downs.
He’s a college athlete who has been in the spotlight for awhile. His father is a coach. So as he looks at some of what he learned his second full year as a starter, he wraps them in the standard language of an athlete interview.
At times late in the 2018 season, he admitted his season was about navigating leadership, managing highs and lows that come with a season. He drilled into something fundamental but still technical, and perhaps it says something larger about his own journey.
“I think there’s a lot of lessons we can learn from this year,” Bentley said. “I think taking care of the ball at the beginning of the year is a big thing. Whoever’s fault it was, it was an interception, so I think that’s the big thing. But I think the understanding of being able to take the second part of the year and grow on that and be able to understand the mindset that it takes to be able to win.”
He’s now entering a fourth season on campus. He’s been considered an offensive leader for the past two years.
Yet there have been rolling ups and downs for him. His first year (2016) he was hailed as a conquering hero and the future. His second (2017) opened with him being called “presidential” and ended with just a solid season.
Last fall, his start was simply not that good. He struggled with deep balls and, at one point, led the SEC in interceptions. He got hurt and watched backup Michael Scarnecchia lead the team to a win, then returned and got booed off the field after a disastrous first half.
Then everything clicked and he was quite good for 6 ½ games. He was prolific, the offense was firing … and then South Carolina got shut out in the Belk Bowl by a middling Virginia team that picked him off twice and held him to a completion percentage of 43.6.
He finished with 3,171 yards (third-best in program history), a record 510 yards against Clemson, 27 touchdowns (second-most in school history) and 14 interceptions, 10 in the team’s six losses.
Before the bowl he was asked about what he could take from that bad start and hot finish. Like he often did, he made it about something beyond his own experience.
“There’s so much to be learned from this season by the whole team,” Bentley said. “Just the way we responded to adversity throughout the year. The way guys have just really had to battle back and lean on each other throughout the whole year.”
It’s worth noting, in South Carolina’s program history, there haven’t been many quarterbacks who left on their highest note. Connor Shaw did, but had to weather calls for his backup into his senior year. Dylan Thompson took criticism throughout his record-breaking senior season.
Bentley will not only be the senior leader, but he’ll also be the oldest presence in the quarterback room for the first time. When he came to campus, he was the second-most experienced scholarship freshman on the roster.
He was for so long the freshman who skipped a year of high school to enroll early. Now he’s the old guy.
“That’s one thing that’s kind of hit me lately,” Bentley said. “It’s going to be weird, going to be weird for me being that older guy, but I think it’s going to be cool to really just be able to see how they grow, to help them the best I can.”
He’ll have Jay Urich, Dakereon Joyner and Ryan Hilinski battling for the backup behind him and likely looking for guidance, as he’s now the elder statesman, a veteran of 32 starts.
When he announced his return for his senior season, Bentley said he had unfinished business. His team is still looking for either a win against Clemson or a trip to Atlanta. Considering the brutal 2019 schedule, he’ll likely hear about coming back to meet those goals.
He got good at tuning that out soon after he arrived on campus, he said. Whether it was the back pats online when things were going well, or the venom and boos when they weren’t, he’s gone though a lot and learned a good bit at he stares down his final season.
“It’s college football,” Bentley said. “You can’t be worried about what social media is like or anything else. It’s been a process of breaking that real fast.”
This story was originally published February 25, 2019 at 11:35 PM with the headline "What Jake Bentley learned going through a rocky 2018 season."
