Felder: Negative Midlands media comes with job

Commentary by Ted Felder

Day after day, week after week, the one thing you count on if you're a football coach at South Carolina is a bucket of hostility from the Midlands media. Steve Spurrier is finding out in a hurry that every single decision he makes about his football team will be scrutinized and ripped apart with the anger and heat of a thousand white-hot suns. Whether it's scholarships, comments about NCAA violations, importance of games or whatever the topic of the day is, he has faced and will face bristling agitation. (And this will just be from the "hometown" newspaper alone!)

Biting and harsh criticism of the results on the field and/or holding a coach accountable for his decisions, promises and strategies is fair game. The media shouldn't be some type of "homer" megaphone pumping out the company line on command. Of course they should hold the program accountable when needed. Just don't try to pretend that any type of fair and normal "balance" in coverage exists in the Midlands media when it comes to the Gamecocks. This is especially true at The State, and has been for decades.

You cannot make the case that any other school in the SEC or ACC faces this type of outright resentment and agenda pushing from their hometown newspaper. The negative writings at other schools are almost always of the armchair-quarterback variety. (i.e. "the coach should have known better about this call" or "why would you do this on 3rd-and-long," etc, etc.) At USC, the football coach faces a negative drumbeat of a different variety, and this drumbeat can get as exhausting as it is relentless.

Now it should be noted that Carolina fans do play a role in this. They are often reactionary and oversensitive, and this tendency to become "wounded martyrs" at the drop of a hat increases tenfold after a loss. The garnet "rabbit ears" can be as intense as a satellite radar, and some featherheads don't even want legitimate critical comment brought into the discussion of USC sports.

Regardless, an objective review of what is happening at The State shows that they have at their core an "attack Carolina first" mentality. Some USC fans point to a specific columnist by name because he's the "hit-man du jour," but even if that columnist moved on another would take his place based on the paper's history. Anything said in The State that is negative about USC should always be taken with a grain of salt.

Spurrier is still in his "honeymoon" period. Some folks believe that since he has long-time contacts with the current "poison-pen" sports columnist at The State, he might enjoy a free ride. Who knows, maybe Spurrier will be the one to get the Gamecocks to a level of winning that drowns this type of thing out. Ray Tanner has certainly shown that you can make them look silly by winning. The State has been reduced to whining about the new baseball stadium and cheerleading for the return of minor-league ball to Columbia because they can't go after Tanner or USC for anything else. (The good news for the paper is that all 48 people who give a rat's rear end about the subject are fully on board with their crusade.)

Having said that, if Spurrier can't take care of it with winning, his sharp tone and straight talk will earn him several years of Midlands media tenderizing, and an eventual negative exit out of the school. This garbage has been going on since Herman Helms first decided he knew more about football than the USC coaches, and nothing has really changed. All of the following sentiments were either created or exploited by The State:

· Paul Dietzel was just too old to keep coaching and should have just been an A.D.

· Jim Carlen was just too much of a jerk.

· Richard Bell shouldn't have ever been hired and had to go after one year

· Joe Morrison was corrupt as could be, and took the "easy way out."

· Sparky Woods was just too darn nice and clean to win in the SEC.

· Brad Scott was just a country-boy ding-dong who could barely tie his shoes and get dressed. (okay, so they got one right)

· Lou Holtz was just a dog-and-pony traveling salesman who sold the University a bunch of snake oil and left it riddled with the cancer of a million NCAA violations.

Sure they were right sometimes, but the point is that they were dead wrong often as well. With that being the case, the hometown newspaper should at least give the benefit of the doubt to the University once in a while, but not in Columbia. If the pattern is not changed, and USC is not winning big-time starting in 2006, look for another hatchet job to begin.

To contact Felder or view other articles he's written, click here.

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