South Carolina Fans Storm Field After 27-24 Win Over Tennessee, Trashing End Zone Bushes

South Carolina's 27-24 victory over No. 11 Tennessee on Saturday ended with fans pouring onto the field at Williams-Brice Stadium, and the celebration left a visible mark. The program's familiar end zone bushes were scattered and torn up in the rush, a cost the school itself noted afterward with a social media post lamenting the damage.

The reaction was understandable in context, even though South Carolina had entered the game as the betting favorite and the result was not technically an upset. The Gamecocks opened SEC play 0-3, then won at Florida in Week 6 and came out of a Week 7 bye to play their first home game since a 35-34 loss to Kentucky, a game in which they had built a 17-0 first-half lead before falling. Beating a ranked Tennessee team at home turned that early slide into a very different-looking season at 4-3 overall and 2-3 in the SEC.

For Tennessee, the loss is the other side of that field storm — a ranked team beaten on the road by an opponent that treated the win as a turning point. South Carolina still faces long odds for the College Football Playoff, put at just 1.1% because of its three losses, but its closing schedule was described as manageable, with trips to Oklahoma, Arkansas and Clemson and home games against Texas A&M and No. 5 Georgia still ahead.

South Carolina's next game is at Oklahoma on Halloween at 4:15 p.m. ET on SEC Network. For the Volunteers, the immediate takeaway is simpler: they left Columbia with a close loss, while the home crowd celebrated long enough — and hard enough — to wreck the landscaping.