This week, there was a glimmer of hope for allowing fans into Williams-Brice during football season, and South Carolina is going to make an attempt pretty soon to get approval to have fans in the stands this fall.

Governor Henry McMaster announced sports venues are allowed to have fans starting Monday, Aug. 3 and the Gamecocks will present to the state's Department of Commerce to see if they can have over 250 people in the stands this fall.

“We will," Ray Tanner said of a presentation. "We will have the models prepared by early next week to share. I don’t know when the decision will be made. Hopefully it’s sooner rather than later. We’ll have to present to the department of commerce to show how we’ll do the ingress and egress and distancing in the stadium."

Right now McMaster's order, Tanner said, allows for gatherings up to 250 people at sports venues and anything over would require special permission from the state government.

Tanner, speculating on a Zoom call Friday, said the athletic department hopes to have a little over 20,000 fans at Williams-Brice, if approved, which is roughly a quarter of the stadiums' capacity.

They will have to present , hopefully sometime next week Tanner said, with a fairly in-depth presentation to show all of the safety measures the university is taking.

"Safety as far as making sure you’re doing everything possible,” Tanner said. “You have to go deep into the weeds with ingress and egress, common areas, concessions. It won’t be the same. It’ll probably be more grab and go type of concessions than people are used to. We’ll still try to provide the same experience if we have the opportunity to play college football with social distance. Whether it’s encouraging or mandating masking coming into the stadium we’re not sure."

Tanner also talked about masks, saying while the university might not require one if someone is sitting in the bowl, it would be strongly encouraged upon entering the stadium.

"If you’re out in the bowl we’ll encourage that too. It’s worth noting our medical professionals told us for someone to sit in a three or four-hour football game with a mask on is probably not the right ting to do from a medical standpoint with the heat and humidity we deal with," he said. "There are some things we have to work through. Our model is set and ready to go based on what we want to do attendance wise.”