The 2026-27 college basketball season is still almost seven months away, but we already have a pretty good idea of what South Carolina’s schedule will look like. 

South Carolina’s schedule will consist of 16 conference games and up to 15 non-conference games. The non-conference slate is already mostly filled out, with as many as 10 games already scheduled. 

There are three games for which the opponent and date are already scheduled: 

November 2 vs Maryland in Paris
November 15 vs Southern Cal in Greenville, SC
November 24 vs UConn in Uncasville, CT

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South Carolina has also announced that it will play North Carolina in Charlotte at the Ally Tipoff. The date for the game has not yet been announced, but the previous Ally Tipoffs have been in the first week or two of the season.

South Carolina also has its annual rivalry game at Clemson, plus a game at Grand Canyon. That serves as the return game of a home-and-home series that began last season. The Gamecocks are also due to host this season in the annual ACC/SEC Challenge.

That puts South Carolina at seven non-conference games. In November, Dawn Staley confirmed that South Carolina would return to the Players Era Championship for the next two seasons. Last season, the event consisted of two games. But the rumor in Las Vegas during the event was that it would expand to at least three games next season, and possibly add additional teams.

The Players Era Championship organizers have announced teams for the 2026 men’s event, but not the women’s event.

With as few as five non-conference games to schedule, we can predict the type of opponents. There will probably be an HBCU, an in-state foe, and a mid-major. It remains to be seen if Dawn Staley will continue to schedule a non-conference game during conference play.

When South Carolina played in Paris in 2023, the Gamecocks played one fewer non-conference game than they were allowed. Giving up the game helped with the budget and jet-lag (they took several days off after the trip to re-acclimate). They might do that again.

South Carolina owes Penn State a return game for last December’s game in Columbia. That was originally planned for the 2027-28 season. But Penn State has gone through a coaching change, and new coach Tanisha Wright might not want to continue with an agreement she had no part of.

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We can make an educated guess on 15 of the 16 conference games. We don’t know who South Carolina’s home-and-home opponent will be, except that it won’t be Alabama or Texas, who were the home-and-home opponents the last two seasons.

Based on alternating schedules, the road opponents should be Georgia, Mississippi State, Missouri, Ole Miss, Tennessee, Texas, and Vanderbilt.

The home opponents should be Arkansas, Auburn, Florida, Kentucky, LSU, Oklahoma, and Texas A&M. Alabama should also be a home opponent because they hosted South Carolina in 2025, then played home-and-home last season.

There hasn’t really been a pattern to the SEC’s home-and-home pairings in the first two seasons of an 18-team conference. There’s no way to predict the matchups, except that Vic Schaefer will complain about whoever Texas draws.