Pigskin Prophet: Spurrier the master of misdirection |
Greetings to all of you, it’s been awhile.
Crump usually only lets me post during football season – he says I make a lot of people mad and he can’t really pay me in anything but Burger King and Carowinds coupons, but he’s found a recent windfall with Southwest Airlines, so now I get a free Southwest calendar and I asked him if I could write just a little something today. The reason I wanted to write? Steve Spurrier. I have a Clemson tag on the front of my car, and when I went to get gas yesterday the attendant who pumped my gas (he has a Ph.D from Five Points) saw the tag, threw back his mullet so he wouldn’t get gas on it, and started saying that “ole Steve Spurrier done got yer coach again.” Do tell. I smiled at him like I do little children, crazy people and animals and went on my merry way, wondering what he was talking about. I got home, and then saw that South Carolina had their Pro Day (I really thought all of their games were Pro Days, if the definition of getting paid is professional), and saw all of his comments. And I laughed, because they’re funny. As soon as you understand that he is an attention youknowthewordthatgoeshere and learn to just accept him for what he is, it really is quite comical. For me, it’s even more comical, because I understand and know where he is coming from. I know what he knows. I get it. I wish I had Dabo’s phone number so I could tell him, and I wish I could tell all Clemson fans why Spurrier does it. You see, he knows he will never win anything of importance at South Carolina. He understands that division championships and conference championships, that time is over. He had a small window where the SEC East was very, very bad – maybe the worst it’s ever been – and he won the division once, only to get smacked around in embarrassing fashion by Auburn in the title game. That small window has now closed. Florida is back to being Florida. Mark Richt has settled things at Georgia. Vanderbilt actually has a young coach and they are getting better. And we all know that the SEC West is really the bad boy of that conference – Texas A&M, Alabama, LSU – they all have chances to win titles, but not the school in Columbia, S.C. So, if you’re a coach, and you know you can’t win the games that really count, and you can’t win divisions and play in title games and go to BCS bowls and be one of the big boys nationally, you divert attention away from that by pointing out the one good thing you can do – you beat your rival. For people like Harley the gas station attendant, that’s all that matters. The coach plays that up. And in a way, that makes him the most pathetic of people. Clemson had a coach that could get to a certain point in his own conference, but not any further. He could win some games, he could get ranked, and he could beat his rival. But could he hang up banners in his stadium? No. His name was Tommy Bowden. He got fired. The one thing that Tommy Bowden didn’t do, thank goodness, was buy rings for his players for finishing in the middle of the conference. Another thing I laugh at with people like ole Harley is the SEC chest thumping. I wonder if they realize that the very thing they crow about (pun intended) is the very thing that will keep them from winning titles? Their conference that they love so much is filled with so many programs that are just better. They will win the titles. The rest of the conference will hang onto that. And with some of them, their coach will beat his rival and use misdirection with his own fan base so he can keep the job and feed that enormous ego. It must be hard to look up the road and see a young coach that has championships in his future; that has an entire coaching career with success staring him in the face. It must eat at him. And maybe, just maybe, he can win over that young coach for one more year, and he can talk a little smack and order rings for that. Maybe he won’t. Maybe even that run is over. No matter what happens, the young coach should just keep quiet, and give the old guy the smile we save for crazy people and little kids and animals. As for us fans, the next time old Tomm…I mean Steve…pops off, we should smile and nod and know that’s all he has, and understand his reasoning. The young coach can talk about a possible division title this season, maybe even a conference title. A BCS bowl game. If the cards fall right, there might even be a national title run in there. He will beat his rival again, and the pendulum will swing, and then the old coach will have to look at the baseball championship banners at his own school. He will ponder the fates that led him to this point – and begin a war of words with Kentucky’s coach. It’s what you do when you can’t win anything else.
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