Gamecocks happy to be home for final three games

South Carolina is hoping a change of scenery will bring a change results for its football team.

“It almost feels like we haven’t played at home this year,” Gamecocks interim coach Shawn Elliott said Sunday, one day after his team fell to 0-5 in road games with a 27-24 loss to Tennessee.

South Carolina (3-6 overall, 1-6 SEC) takes on Florida on Saturday at noon in Williams-Brice Stadium. It will be the Gamecocks’ first home game since Oct. 17 against Vanderbilt and second home game since Sept. 26 against UCF. South Carolina is 2-1 at Williams-Brice this season.

“It’s going to be great to come out here at Williams-Brice Stadium. It’s something we’ve been waiting on,” Elliott said. “That’s going to be real positive for us and we need a big crowd. We need a great crowd, a crowd that is ready to come out and see our team play well. We expect to have them out there and we expect them to be loud, and I believe they’ll be there.”

The Gators (8-1, 6-1) clinched the SEC East title on Saturday with a 9-7 win over Vanderbilt.

“We have to move on and have another great week of preparation for a great football team,” Elliott said.

The Gamecocks played mostly evenly with the Volunteers on Saturday, gaining 385 total yards to Tennessee’s 408, and they had a chance to win in the game’s final minute until senior tight end Jerell Adams fumbled at the Volunteers’ 18-yard line.

“We did the things necessary to put ourselves in position to win,” Elliott said. “All in all, you have to look back and think there was an opportunity to win the football game, and we didn’t get it done.”

South Carolina must win the remainder of its games to avoid its worst overall record since at least 2003, when Lou Holtz’s team finished 5-7 overall and 2-6 in the SEC. The Gamecocks haven’t won fewer than five games in a season since the winless 1999 season.

“It’s one game at a time,” junior quarterback Perry Orth said. “You can’t look too far in the future, because you are not going to overlook Florida. We put together two pretty solid performances in two of the toughest places in college football to play (Neyland Stadium and Texas A&M’s Kyle Field). We’re pretty close.”

This story was originally published November 8, 2015 at 8:44 PM with the headline "Gamecocks happy to be home for final three games."