A Bluffton customer at Jock’s Sports Grill on Saturday thought it was “pretty convenient” that a Time Warner contractor cut a Hargray cable right before a major USC football game, employee Heather Deterra said.

Deterra said the bar was busy Saturday night with people driven out of their homes by a Hargray service outage, preventing them from watching the Gamecocks play the LSU Tigers on the comfort of their couches. Despite the conspiracy theories, Hargray spokesman Robert Gilbert said it’s not uncommon for contractors to mistakenly cut cables while performing unrelated work.

In the case of Saturday’s outage to Bluffton residential areas in Moss Creek and near the Tanger Outlets, a Time Warner contractor accidentally snipped a Hargray fiber optic cable at about 1:30 p.m., Gilbert said.

He didn’t know how many people were affected by the outage, which ended at about 3 a.m. Sunday when the cable was replaced.

“As a die-hard USC fan, I might have been better off not watching that game,” Gilbert joked. The No. 9-ranked Tigers narrowly defeated the third-ranked Gamecocks by a score of 23-21.

Though Jocks was packed with Hargray subscribers who couldn’t tune in to the game from their living rooms, other Bluffton bars and restaurants reported the usual Saturday football crowd.

“We had our normal Gamecock turnout,” said Bluffton’s Wild Wings Cafe assistant general manager Bob Vallino. “I had more complaints about our Wi-Fi being down than anything,”