College football fans’ thirst for instability and how it impacts Gamecocks football
Last week, South Carolina lost out on four-star football prospect Reggie Grimes. He’s from Tennessee and is the No. 54 recruit in the country, a high-ceiling pass rusher with room to grow.
Set aside that it’s a credit to Will Muschamp’s staff’s recruiting, the insular nature of the Southeast and the brand power of the SEC that USC was considered a favorite to land him in the first place, especially considering the history of the Oklahoma program he’s set to join.
Reporting from both 247Sports and Rivals suggested comments from school president Robert Caslen about Muschamp’s future at USC played a role in the recruit’s decision to pick the Sooners. Grimes has not said anything publicly on the matter, but he interacted with several Twitter posts referencing how Caslen’s words might have impacted his choice.
And this was after Caslen said what a lot of Gamecocks fans had hoped was true, that Muschamp’s return in 2020 wasn’t certain, even if they weren’t happy with the timing and way in which he said it.
Of most any major sport, college football is by far the slowest developing. There are big rosters, big depth charts and bodies that often need to be built up. That kind of process often requires a level of continuity.
Yet from the fan perspective, there is an insatiable thirst for instability.
Speak to fans — young, old, all across the spectrum — and through a season there will be calls to bench a quarterback, fire a coach, fire a coordinator, fire the athletics director who hired the coach, try a new play-caller, play this hotshot freshman or that former hotshot recruit who didn’t pan out.
Across the internet on message boards everywhere, the same inaccurately attributed Albert Einstein quote about the definition of insanity — doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result — gets trotted out and points to the fact that some change, any change, will help.
Early in a tenure there’s some leeway, but it gets burned through rather quickly. At times it seems fans feel an AD’s second-biggest job, behind hiring a good football coach, is making sure those coaches are comfortably fireable most of the time.
In some ways, Steve Spurrier contributed to this with Gamecocks fans. He was a coach who often leaned toward instability, and spoke in those terms quite a bit.
He rarely had a quarterback situation he didn’t tinker with on the fly. He went into a game against LSU in his final season with a throwaway line about how all three quarterbacks might get a chance to play. He was fond of addressing some deficiency in his team‘s play, and then say, “We’ve got to have somebody on the roster who can do it.”
But the majority of the time, the backup isn’t a secret star who will flourish as soon as he’s thrown onto the big stage. He is probably just a player who isn’t quite as good (or yet quite as good) as the guy in front of him.
Any change in a coaching sense is just another bite at the apple. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it works for a time and then stops. Maybe it doesn’t work at first and then does eventually.
South Carolina looks to have a season of instability for the next year. Will Muschamp’s future will be a constant source of conversation with a schedule that again looks tough at the top. A new president is still overseeing an inherited AD, one whose highest-profile hire is the embattled football coach.
Whether a change might happen is not yet known, but the ground is fertile for something to shift, and those who want that instability will get to live with it for the next year.
This story was originally published December 6, 2019 at 9:15 AM.
