Dec. 22, 2009

The University of South Carolina football squad spent Tuesday afternoon working out in Williams-Brice Stadium in preparation for the Papajohns.com Bowl game, scheduled for January 2, 2010 in Birmingham, Ala. The Gamecocks (7-5) will face the UConn Huskies (7-5) out of the Big East Conference at 1 p.m. CT at historic Legion Field.

“A pretty decent practice,” said head coach Steve Spurrier following the two-hour session. “Guys threw it and caught it pretty well against the air. That hasn’t happened a lot around here, so we had some encouraging practice plays today.

“I think we’ve had pretty good practices (since the regular season ended) and hopefully we can maintain some momentum after the Christmas break. We’ve got a lot of young guys and we don’t have a lot of guys thinking about pro football right now. Hopefully a lot of our juniors will come back. We’ll see how all that plays out.

“Stephen Garcia is throwing the ball better,” noted the Head Ball Coach. “He’s learning how to make a lot better throws – trying to get rid of that sinker ball he throws to the right every now and then. He hasn’t thrown many of those in the last few days so that’s encouraging.

“We’re ok,” said Coach Spurrier when asked about the team’s academics for the fall semester. “Everybody passed enough hours. I think we only had one player that only passed six hours and he is a walk-on you never heard of. It’s the first time in my coaching career that we had more walk-on guys under 2.0 than scholarship guys. We’re not going to have that again. That’s good for the scholarship guys but not good for the walk-ons. We like to brag about that GPA when we go recruiting. South Carolina is a wonderful place. If you go to class and try, football players can certainly graduate from our school. That’s a good message that we’re trying to send out there.”

The Gamecocks will hold their final practice prior to breaking for the Christmas holidays on Wednesday morning at 9 a.m.