Eight wins a year and a statue? How to judge success for next Gamecocks coach
South Carolina football is in the midst of a coaching search, which means we’re in the midst of the cliche Olympics.
“USC can’t live with the mindset of win eight games and build the guy a statue.”
“If expectations are at a certain level, we’ll be back at another search in five years.”
At the start, one has to wonder how these cliches come up for the USC program. Is winning eight games the ceiling? Or an average? Steve Spurrier won barely more than eight games a year, and he’s the best the program has ever seen (plus, someone going 8-5 five-plus years in a row would be something interesting to watch).
As much as people trot out the every-five-years thing, South Carolina went 20 years between firing a coach after five years. Of the three five-year coaches since the mid-1960s, the best was barely above .400 his final two years, which gets most folks fired.
Most of the time, unless a fan is one of the big-money booster sort, expectations are mostly about how an individual deals with outcomes. College football players’ and coaches’ expectations operate on a whole different plane.
The Gamecocks find themselves with an intractable problem of sorts. They boast a level of financial commitment and fan fervor that puts them in the top 20-25 of the sport. But college football is relative, and there are teams that are equal or better in that department on the schedule every year, many with more natural advantages.
Every year, the schedule will feature Georgia, Texas A&M and a Florida program that both spends more and could recruit the monster talent of the 1990s despite so-so facilities and a head coach in Spurrier who didn’t have much passion for recruiting.
Every year, the Gamecocks will get a Clemson team whose current recruiting South Carolina cannot quickly match without a heap of attention from the NCAA. Every year, USC must face a Tennessee team that recruits so well each head coach in the past 15 years has secured a top-10 class (yes, even Derek Dooley and the coach who was there for one year, Lane Kiffin).
Half the years, the schedule features Alabama, LSU or Auburn. Almost half the years, it will feature another competent Power 5 program in the nonconference, a choice that will put a dent in the record every few seasons.
Simply put, that’s going to make life hard a lot of the time. That’s not to say all those teams will be at full capacity every year, but chances are, enough will that a schedule will not forgive even some strong teams.
And that means counting wins is going to be a tricky affair.
Wins are a two-way street. They reflect quality of a team, but they reflect the opposition almost as much. Put a lot of teams with gaudy records in the SEC West, and that number in the standings changes, even if the team’s objective quality doesn’t.
You are what your record says you are, they say, but no one said last year that Appalachian State was better than UGA despite a better record.
So demanding X number of wins a year means it’s probably better to stop scheduling UNC or Miami in the nonconference (a debate worth having), because the team isn’t leaving the SEC or dropping Clemson.
But there’s a pivot in outlook. There’s a way to build expectations. There’s a mandate to give whoever lands this tricky coaching job.
Build strong teams. That’s it.
Sometimes a strong team doesn’t have the best record, but it’s often not so hard to spot. Strong teams most of the time compete with better teams and beat worse teams comfortably. No coach can bat 1.000, but outside an off year every five or six seasons, if you field a team of quality, it sets things up well.
Even taking the schedule into account, the Gamecocks haven’t been there the past two years. Using a couple of advanced metrics that measure team quality in a national ranking (think similar to the ones Las Vegas uses to set its betting lines), South Carolina was somewhere between 47th and 60th last year and is somewhere between 68th and 80th this season.
That’s not going to get it done. Will Muschamp said as much last season, and that leads to what happened last week.
Looking at that, it’s mostly reasonable to expect a top-35 or better team in those rankings. South Carolina recruits to that level (better actually), and the right coach should get as much as he can from the talent. Some years that might dip into the high 30s or 40s, but it’s reasonable to expect those wouldn’t be common.
Now, a top-30 quality team doesn’t mean fringe top-25 finishes or better most years. The top 25 polls are about record, and the bottom will often have mid-majors and nine-win Big Ten teams that won Florida bowls.
But a top-30 team is in position to take advantage of situations. Remember when we talked about the edges UF, Tennessee, UGA and everyone had? Well, they’re not being put to use all the time. Sometimes Florida has situations like the Zook and even McElwain years. UGA has had plenty of moments of underachieving. Tennessee has moments like … well, right now. (There are also moments when close games and a brutal schedule bite, and a 5-7 record might happen for a top-30 team)
A Gamecocks program that fields strong teams takes advantage of those down opponents, pulls an upset here and there and fattens the record where it can. If a team is pretty good consistently, it gets itself in position.
Maybe that’s in position for the schedule to open up. Maybe that’s in position for a run of talent like the one that powered the Spurrier glory years (or, dare we say, the two runs that helped push Clemson up rungs on the national ladder?).
Wins are almost always the currency of joy in this sport. In the end, they’ll determine when a coach is let go.
But when it comes to expectations, when it comes to what folks outside the program feel they can accept, demand strong teams that play hard and compete, and the rest follows if given the right time and support.
This story was originally published November 23, 2020 at 7:15 AM.
