April 7, 2006

The South Carolina Gamecocks worked out for the final time this spring at the Bluff Road practice fields Friday afternoon under sunny skies and pleasant temperatures. It was their final tune-up prior to Saturday’s Garnet & Black Spring Game, which is set for 2 p.m. Saturday at Williams-Brice Stadium. Following the workout, Head Coach Steve Spurrier addressed the media:

“Hopefully the rain will hold off tomorrow and we’ll be able to get the game in. We’ll see how the weather turns out tomorrow. Hopefully our crowd will be here. We have a lot of recruits coming. It’s always good to have 25 or 30,000 at a spring game. That would be a nice crowd. Hopefully everyone will turn out and support our guys and our players can put on a performance as if they know what they are doing, play with some effort, tackle, block, act like we are a decent football team.

“We divided them as evenly as we could. Obviously we have a few guys who have to play for both teams. They will be on the green team. So we’ll have garnet, black and the green guys. The defense can only play a couple of coverages and the offense only a couple of formations. We’ll keep it relatively simple. No blitzes. We divided two defensive coaches and two offensive coaches and the rest of them will coach their guys.

“Blake (Mitchell) will get to play a lot. He needs to play a lot. It appears he will be our quarterback – he needs all the practice he can get.

About the spring overall: “It’s gone very well because there have been very few injuries. That’s the way I always judge it. We’re a long way off from being a good team. We’re probably a very average bunch of guys right now. But maybe we can get better. We have a lot of time and a lot of freshmen coming in. Those freshmen have got to help us. We’ve got areas we think where the freshmen can play. We’ve just got to wait until they get here and see how fast they can learn and play. We’ve got to do some fast coaching come August.”