South Carolina Isn't Ready to be an SEC Contender

First. I have said it once and I will say it again...USC is in California. Never refer to it as anywhere else.

Reports are that two of Steve Spurrier's latest recruits were denied admission to the University of South Carolina by the admissions department. As the team reported for practice last Friday, they were without two of their newcomers.

As you can imagine, Spurrier wasn't the happiest about this.

"Hopefully, I truly believe this is the last year this is going to happen, because I can't operate like that," Spurrier said. "I can't operate misleading young men."

Apparently, Spurrier doesn't have the same power of authority as he did at Florida. I'm not going to make any direct statements concerning specific players, but UF is a very difficult school to get into, especially out of state. Much harder than South Carolina in fact. Do you think there was, and today is, any problem with getting recruits past admissions? Did you listen to UF's post game interviews last year?

In order to compete in the SEC, or for a national title for that matter, not only your team but the entire university operation has to make the commitment to football excellence. You see it at Florida State, Miami, Tennessee, LSU, and Georgia; places where football players are above all taken care of. At UT, we all experienced these factors first hand. A great story was one of a girl with a broken finger who had been waiting at the clinic for an hour. An over-hyped once blue chip outside linebacker with a single digit number came in, sat next to her, smelled really bad, and was immediately called back. They've gotten around the car issue. But hundred dollar handshakes still exist, as well as all the other standard operating procedures.

Major college athletes get the breaks around campus and in the classroom. It doesn't matter if they are in fact not intelligent, but the fact that they know they can get away with not studying because they are part of the program and the university is going to take care of them allows them not to participate in standard roles of academia.

You can say this is either right or wrong. Again, it doesn't really matter what you think because these are what brings millions of dollars to the university year in and year out. And major universities are accepting that as a business plan.

South Carolina is not yet one of them. Until they accept that they are going to have to do what is necessary to win conference championships playing football in the South Eastern Conference, they simply won't have the resources to do so.

Finally, regarding the quote from Spurrier. Do you really think he cares about misleading young men? Ask Patrick Ramsey about that.