Oct. 23, 2012

The University of South Carolina football squad worked out in full pads Tuesday afternoon at the Bluff Road practice fields.

The No. 17/16 Gamecocks (6-2, 4-2 SEC) will host the Tennessee Volunteers (3-4, 0-4 SEC) on Saturday, October 27. Game time is set for Noon ET. The game will be televised nationally on ESPN with Dave Pasch and Brian Griese in the booth and Jenn Brown working the sidelines. The game is a sellout.

Special teams coach Joe Robinson’s unit had a tough day at Florida last Saturday, but he believes they’ll be ready to go again this week against the Vols. “They’re back and working hard,” he said of his special teams. “They’re working like they do every week. Every week we have things we have to fix. Some of them this week were probably a little more obvious to everybody.”

Robinson indicated that when something goes wrong, the team needs to put it behind them as quickly as possible. “Guys have just to play the next snap. If we stand on the sidelines and think `boy, this is really something and everything is going wrong’, that’s probably not very good. All we can do is try to play the next snap and try to play better.”

Fumbles were an issue for the returners at Florida. “Unfortunately, we worked on ball security before we fumbled them,” noted Robinson. “They happened and you can see on film why they happened. We’ve got some guys that really want to make plays. They’ve made some plays and when they made plays earlier in the year the ball was loose, and that’s our fault for not getting that corrected. Ball security is number 1. There are fundamentals of ball security that we teach and they were not followed. The ball was too loose. Eventually it’s going to cost you and eventually it did cost us.”

The Gamecocks will return to the practice fields on Wednesday afternoon.