‘I wasn’t comfortable staying quiet’: Why Tanner issued statement to support Muschamp
Several reporters approached Ray Tanner on Saturday night at Kyle Field to ask for more information related to his statement of support for football coach Will Muschamp. Tanner politely declined to comment on the subject.
But South Carolina’s athletics director did speak about it during the team’s pregame radio show with Todd Ellis ahead of a 30-6 loss to Texas A&M that dropped the team to 4-7.
Tanner made the statement in light of some of the buzz and crisis surrounding the football team and university through the week, he said.
“We have a very formal year-end evaluation of all of our coaches that they take part in,” Tanner said. “It’s well-documented, and to have to speak out before the season ends, I wasn’t comfortable doing it, but I wasn’t comfortable staying quiet either.”
Some members of the school’s board of trustees spoke publicly and were split on whether USC could afford to pay Muschamp’s almost $19 million contract buyout if he were to be fired at season’s end. Then new school president Robert Caslen spoke about Muschamp, saying he was the coach at least through the season. All that led to Tanner’s statement Friday.
Tanner in the radio interview Saturday went on to praise the culture and program Muschamp has built.
“Have we won all the games we wanted to? No, we haven’t,” Tanner said. “We would love to have a couple of those back. But I just felt strongly about who he is and the type of program he runs, and I felt I needed to say something. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but that’s the way I felt at the time, and I feel strongly about who he is and the program he runs.”
The Muschamp era has involved some peculiar up and downs. His teams overachieved in Years 1 and 2, first winning six games in 2016 after a 2-4 start and then taking advantage of a softer schedule to win nine games in 2017.
But in 2018, the hype of a possible nine- or 10-win season did not come to fruition with a schedule that proved to be considerably harder than expected, inconsistency on both sides of the ball and a slew of injuries, especially on defense. This year, they sit at 4-7 with a schedule that offered almost no easy wins.
Tanner pointed to coaches with slower starts such as Frank Beamer (24-40 his first six years at Virginia Tech) and Dawn Staley at USC (two losing seasons and only a breakthrough in Year 4). He also pointed out that football has the longest turnaround of any sport because of roster size and development timeline.
Tanner said he felt the resources are in place, something Muschamp echoed later that night. He said the goal is championships, but noted even games like Georgia provide opportunities for big and notable wins.
And there’s a level of understanding that football carries the lion’s share of the attention, and the week-to-week swings tend to be the most wild.
“We’re living in an age right now where there’s not a lot of patience in anything we do,” Tanner said, “football certainly being part of the equation.”
On Saturday night, Tanner was in the Aggies’ palatial Kyle Field, a monument to the large investment Texas A&M fans have put in that program. Although the host team won, they face the very real possibility of going 7-5 with a $7.5 million coach — Texas A&M closes with road games at Georgia and LSU — so the pressure might be on there as well.
In the midst of all of it, the noise and the criticism that force a statement he wasn’t totally comfortable with, Tanner said he cherished those fan expectations.
“To me, it’s like, ‘Hey, you guys care,’” Tanner said of fans. “I know you probably don’t deliver it the right way sometimes to make me happy, but I appreciate who you are and the passion that you exhibit.”
