Saturday was supposed to be South Carolina's season opener, a home game against Coastal Carolina but Coronavirus had other plans.

With COVID-19 pushing the start of the season back until Sept. 26, the Gamecocks are practicing now and, on what was supposed to be the season kickoff, was instead the team's second scrimmage of training camp.

South Carolina scrimmaged under the lights at Williams-Brice trying to mimic game day against Tennessee as best it could, and Muschamp left overall pleased with what he saw.

Below are his full opening comments about what he saw from the 160-snap practice.

“We had a great night at the stadium. We had about 140 live scrimmage snaps, which was awesome. Our guys really got after it and I thought they competed. We had about 20 live special teams snaps: kickoff, kickoff return, punt, punt block, field goal, PAT.

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It was a lot of situational work, so we had about 160 snaps. Coming out of the scrimmage, Trai Jones rolled his ankle a little bit but he should be fine. That’s it.

A lot of really good competition and competitive work done. There’s a lot of improvement needed. As we went back and watched the tape today and last night, but if we continue to work the way we worked Saturday night, we’ll be on the verge of some really good things.

I challenged our team when the scrimmage was over. We’re going to have our meetings on Monday, our normal Tuesday, normal Wednesday and normal Thursday and a meeting on Friday then we’ll be back in Williams-Brice at noon. I hope it’s hot.

We have to battle that. We have to get mentally tougher as a football team to battle through the mental fatigue. My father used to tell me don’t let anything without a heart whip you. Fatigue, humidity, heat, rain, snow, none of that has a heart. Another man may whip my ass but the other stuff doesn’t. We have to get mentally tougher as a football team.

Conversely, defensively anything we do well offensively is an issue defensively. We took care of the football. We had 160 scrimmage snaps and the ball was on the ground one time. That was one too many but we really took care of the football, which is pleasing. We had a lot of explosive plays.

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I go back to our first scrimmage in the red zone and the third down period defensively we did very well but in the move the ball periods we did hit some plays. I think it’s really a credit to our guys in what we’re doing. We were better in the red zone and better in end-game situations than we’ve been. Too many negative plays on first and 10. I believe five different times we started first and 15 because of a procedure issues. We didn’t have any delay of games but it was flinching on the offensive line, not covering up the right guys, and not having enough guys on the line.

That contributed to us not doing well on third down because we were behind on down and distance a lot. That was frustrating. Again, I saw a lot of improvement from scrimmage one to scrimmage two just as far as our operation offensively. Coaches were off and we treated it just like a game and I was pleased.

Defensively the thing that strikes you is no turnovers. We had one ball on the ground and had two young D-linemen loafing and not running to the ball and could have had the opportunity to recover the fumble. That’s great teaching for them to understand you bust your ass to the football.

We had two balls tipped in the air and opportunities to get them and didn’t get them. We have to make sure we take care of the opportunities. In the first two scrimmages we tackled extremely well. I think we had 12 missed tackles last week in 140-something snaps and we had eight this week in 160.

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I’m very pleased with how we’ve played in space. We’ve given up too many explosives and weren’t as good in the red area or end of game but very good on third down. We had a lot of favorable down and distances to manage.

Special teams, we covered about 10 punts live. I thought Kai punted the ball extremely well. We did miss a pooch opportunity, which he has to understand that. He put it about eight deep and we need to be able to pin our opponent inside the 10-yard line. We missed that opportunity.

I thought our protection was good, our coverage can be better. We have to continue to improve there. Kickoff and kickoff return, the emphasis was more on our kickoff coverage. We did get two live reps and thought it was solid fundamentally. We were high with some pads and leverage the ball better.

Mitch Jeter would be our kickoff guy if we played tomorrow and Parker’s had an outstanding camp kicking the football when he’s had his opportunities. I’m overall pleased. I thought we made some strides from scrimmage one to now.

We have in essence another week of training camp with a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday practice and another game-like situation on Saturday.”