4 days until the Gamecocks play: 4 games to watch most closely in 2020
The South Carolina football team’s schedule is treacherous, that’s for sure.
The switch to conference-only schedules in the coronavirus pandemic took three easy wins off the table and created a run of 10 SEC games in 11 weeks. That means six meetings with teams that were in the preseason top 25, five in the top 15.
These four bear the closest watching, as they stand out as building blocks to a successful season.
1. Tennessee, Sept. 26
Not starting with an easy one, the Gamecocks open the season with arguable their most toss-up-ish game of the season. South Carolina is a three-point underdog but is playing at home against a team it’s gone 3-1 against under Will Muschamp. Coming off this deeply unusual offseason, most anything could be in play, but South Carolina’s path to at least a bowl game gets considerably brighter with a win against the Vols.
2. Ole Miss, Nov. 14
This was one of the additional games added when the SEC expanded the conference schedule, and it’s a tricky one. Ole Miss has a new coach in his first year in Lane Kiffin, an artist of offense and a character of sorts. Despite the fact his team went 5-7 last season, the Rebels have some pretty explosive talent and some nice pieces, not unlike the UNC team that beat the Gamecocks last year. This would look better if it wasn’t in Oxford, and it comes at the start of a final four weeks of the season that includes three of the five most winnable games on the schedule.
3. Kentucky, Dec. 5
This one has been a thorn in the Gamecocks’ side for a while, and it comes right at season’s end and on the road in Lexington, where it will no doubt be chilly. There’s no great way to get a sense for what the stakes might be for this one, but it’s going to be the end of a year where each and every win will carry a lot of weight. It might mean the differences in bowling or not, finishing above, at or below .500 — and it’s against a program that has been feisty the past few years.
4. Texas A&M, Nov. 7
They’re the lowest-ranked team of the Top 25 foes on South Carolina’s schedule, and the Aggies are coming to Columbia. The bad news for the Gamecocks is that A&M still has a lot of talent and is only in Year 3 of the Jimbo Fisher era, so some improvement is to be expected. The Aggies won nine games two years ago and eight last year, despite a brutal schedule at the top. South Carolina has yet to beat Texas A&M since their first annual meeting in 2014, and breaking that streak would give a big boost as the Gamecocks finish a particularly rough stretch of the schedule.
South Carolina Gamecocks’ 2020 football schedule
Sept. 26: home vs. Tennessee, 7:30 pm (SEC Network)
Oct. 3: at Florida, noon (ESPN)
Oct. 10: at Vanderbilt
Oct. 17: home vs. Auburn
Oct. 24: at LSU
Oct. 31: OPEN
Nov. 7: home vs. Texas A&M, 7:30 pm (ESPN or SEC Network)
Nov. 14: at Ole Miss
Nov. 21: home vs. Missouri
Nov. 28: home vs. Georgia
Dec. 5: at Kentucky
This story was originally published September 22, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
