MBB: Martin tees off on Gamecocks' critics

SOUTH CAROLINA MEN’S BASKETBALL

South Carolina wrapped up the regular season Saturday, clinching the fourth seed in the SEC Tournament and winning 11 games for the third time in four years. During that span, only Kentucky can boast more success in the SEC, and yet Frank Martin argued that South Carolina continues to get no respect.

Last week, Martin told a story about a man approaching him at Publix and wishing him good luck “next year.” He shared another shopping story Saturday. Last April, a year removed from the Final Four, Martin was at Target when he met an elderly man. Learning that Martin was South Carolina’s basketball coach, the man replied, “Good luck, we haven’t had much success around here lately.”

Martin had another story, albeit a second-hand story. It seems ESPN was doing a breakdown of the tournament prospects of the SEC teams. It ran a graphic of the SEC standings, 1-8, but the fourth team was blanked out. That was South Carolina. They refused to even discuss the fourth best team in the league.

“What happened to number four?” Martin said. “I got pissed when I heard that.

“We’ve got more Quadrant 1 and 2 wins than 13 of the 15 teams they’ve put on the bubble. Why do I have to do that research? I signed up to be a basketball coach, not a promoter. We’ve got the same record as some of the teams we’re competing against. We played five non-conference home games. Some of the teams that got two or three more wins than us, they’ve got a lot of buy games at home. I could have done that.”

He also complained about the lack of respect the SEC gets. He pointed to bubble teams like Indiana, Oklahoma, and TCU, all of whom are at least three games under .500 in conference, and in Indiana’s case, five games

“What’s the difference whether you’re 5-8 in non-league play, or 6-12 in league play?” Martin said. “So the teams that are 6-12 in league play are on the bubble with the similar records to us, or two or three more wins because they played six guarantee games? Why don’t you start speaking about this league evenly and fairly for all the teams that do and don’t belong? The people that cover the other leagues have got you convinced that the 12th place team is better than the second place team in our league. I’ve been here for seven years. This league is so hard right now.”

By the same token, South Carolina is just 81 in the NET Rankings, but Penn State is 47, despite being 6-13 in the Big Ten. How can you trust a system that thinks 6-13 is almost twice as good as 11-7?

Martin mentioned scheduling Virginia and agreeing to play at Wyoming. He asked, rhetorically, why non-conference wins, even against lower level teams, are more important than conference wins.

“If I scheduled like we used to schedule around here, we’d have 23 wins,” Martin said. “I’d like somebody to point out the facts, that we’re not some scrub team that doesn’t belong.”

Martin also talked about how the mess he inherited from Darrin Horn is still held against him. Make no mistake, it was a mess. I wrote at the time that Martin’s first team had only three players who belonged on an SEC roster, and one of those, Bruce Ellington, missed half the season playing football. For whatever reason, even Gamecock fans focus on those teams, not the Final Four run or winning double-digit games in the SEC three of the last four years (by the way, that’s half of the winning conference records total).

“Too many people around here want to speak about the bad days and don’t want to speak about the totality of our good days, and that’s unfortunate,” Martin said. “When I talk about apathy, and I’ve talked about it a lot over the last seven years, that’s what I’m talking about.

“People need to stop talking about South Carolina like we’re still irrelevant like we were seven, eight, nine years ago,” he continued. “We’ve earned the right for people to put us in the conversation with the successful programs in this conference.”

The numbers bear that out. Over the last four years, South Carolina has won 41 conference games, third most in the league. Kentucky has won 54, Florida has won 43, and Tennessee has won 42, and then you have South Carolina.

And yet, South Carolina gets blanked out in the SEC standings. And the NCAA forgets the difference between South Carolina and Southern Cal (remember the 2016 fiasco?). And South Carolina’s fans hope maybe Martin will turn things around next year, that is, the ones who aren’t clamoring for the firing of the school’s third-winningest coach.

(Note: I originally had the wrong number of wins for Florida because I can’t add.)