Those numbers are difficult to ignore, given how they clash with the totals posted last season at South Carolina, which suffered through one of its worst defensive campaigns on record. The Gamecocks as a team managed just 14 sacks in 2014, last in the SEC. USC’s sack leaders, Gerald Dixon and Jordan Diggs, tallied just two each in a year when maintaining pressure on the opposing quarterback emerged as one of the Gamecocks’ biggest headaches of the fall.
Enter Lewis, a Greenwood native who last year was among the nation’s top defensive prospects out of junior college. The Jayhawk Conference Defensive Player of the Year finished with 11 sacks on his own, part of a season where he logged 63 tackles, 20.