Don’t hire Hugh Freeze, South Carolina: New Gamecocks coach should be 1 of these 2 men
The next South Carolina football coach will be both blessed and cursed with one of the most rabid fan bases in American sports.
A non-COVID home game for the Gamecocks in Williams-Brice Stadium is a state fair every Saturday — a beautiful mess of traffic, tailgating and great expectations.
For the new coach — and I think South Carolina should hire either Louisiana’s Billy Napier or Coastal Carolina’s Jamey Chadwell for the job — those great expectations will be the tough part.
“To think you’re going to be Clemson — or beat Clemson — in the next five years would be crazy,” said Ryan McGee, a senior writer at ESPN and one of the foremost authorities on college football in the South. “If you’re South Carolina and you’re going back to the Outback Bowl on a regular basis, that’s pretty good.”
But Gamecock fans don’t want to hear that. They pine for the glory days of Steve Spurrier, when the Gamecocks beat Clemson five years in a row from 2009-13. They often conveniently forget about how Spurrier left the Gamecocks in the lurch when he quit midway through the 2015 season.
Any Gamecock glory days seem a long way off at the moment. Although Will Muschamp is walking out the door, having gotten fired Sunday night, George Rogers is not walking back in. Hated in-state rival Clemson, in the meantime, contends for the national championship every year and can get almost any 4- to 5-star recruit it wants.
Napier or Chadwell? Absolutely
The Gamecocks have been embarrassing for most of the past two years. It started with the 28-0 beatdown South Carolina got handed by Virginia in Charlotte at the Belk Bowl in December 2018.
From that game until now, the Gamecocks are 6-14 over their past 20 games. They gave up an astonishing 708 yards to Ole Miss Saturday in a 59-42 loss, and that was actually a closer game than the demoralizing whippings they had just been handed by LSU (52-24) and Texas A&M (48-3) in the two contests before that.
It was time to get rid of Muschamp, although that $13.2-million buyout is a difficult pill to swallow (and it never should have been that high to begin with).
It should be noted here that Muschamp was beloved by many of his players despite all of those red-faced “let-me-scream-at-the-referee-one-more-time” antics on the sideline. At South Carolina, Muschamp simply didn’t win enough in a place it’s always going to be tough to win due to the Gamecocks’ fearsome schedule. South Carolina went 4-8 in 2019 and started 2-5 this year.
The next South Carolina coach has to be adept at shaping 2- and 3-star recruits into what he wants, because that will be the bulk of the team a while.
That’s why I believe someone with experience in making it work at places like Louisiana (Napier) and Coastal Carolina (Chadwell) would make a lot of sense for South Carolina. Both have experience recruiting the state of South Carolina and the region.
I don’t know either man personally and can’t make an educated call as to which one would be better. For what it’s worth, McGee, believes the Gamecocks should hire Napier away from the Ragin’ Cajuns (which is Jake Delhomme’s alma mater, back when it was called Louisiana-Lafayette).
Don’t hire Hugh Freeze
As for Hugh Freeze, who is now making all sorts of good things happen at undefeated Liberty and will be looking to beat N.C. State Saturday — don’t hire him, South Carolina!
Haven’t the Gamecocks had enough of hiring former big-name coaches from SEC schools? It didn’t work with Muschamp, who never was that great at Florida, either. It worked for awhile with Spurrier, but turned sour at the end.
And Freeze’s tenure at Ole Miss was problematic on several levels — there were NCAA recruiting violations dating back for years, and Freeze abruptly resigned after revelations that he’d called escort services from his university-issued phone. McGee insists that SEC headquarters in Birmingham doesn’t want Freeze back in the league and will make darn sure it doesn’t occur.
“Some folks in Birmingham will personally build a brick wall in front of the head coach’s office door in Columbia to make sure that Freeze getting hired by South Carolina doesn’t happen,” McGee said.
I grew up mostly in Spartanburg, S.C., and went to high school at Dorman. I saw Rogers, who won the Heisman Trophy for South Carolina in 1980, play live at Williams-Brice during the season in which he ran for 100-plus yards in every game. I’ve seen South Carolina beat Clemson in Columbia several times. I know how the Gamecocks’ home stadium sways with screaming joy when it’s all going right.
Chadwell or Napier would have an opportunity to make it feel that way again.
Freeze shouldn’t get the chance.
This story was originally published November 16, 2020 at 2:15 PM.
