It looks like the Spurrier-Garcia relationship has entered a new phase: humorous resignation.
“I stayed mad at him for the last two years, and it didn’t do any good,” Spurrier quipped. “I’ve accepted that he’s doing the best he can. He’s just limited when it comes to some of the things you ask your quarterback to be.”
Not exactly a ringing endorsement there.
At some point you have to wonder about South Carolina’s chances this season if Connor Shaw doesn’t win the starting job.
Get The Picture 
His brutal honest is what I appreciate about him. I don’t agree with how he delivers it.
I think UGA has been lacking the ability to look at your program and be brutally honest. The CWM situation still makes me shake my head. There is always a fine line between giving someone a chance to improve and recognizing they have met the limit of their abilities.
It’s never easy to balance optimism and pessimism. I hope UGA is starting to recognize we need a little pessimism inside the program to constantly improve and assess what is happening.
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It’s time to let the Willie Martinez bitching go by the wayside…
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Until we win another SEC title, the failure of Richt to be honest with himself and fire CWM will continue to haunt the program.
It is as simple as that.
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Garcia is a bonehead. Anybody who has a son older than 11 knows that.
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Not everyone can attend Hahvahd.
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Spurrier really should write self help books. “You Suck, but I Guess You Can’t Help It”, by Coach Steve Spurrier. Jeez, what a hell of a motivator.
I know I’ve beaten this drum before, but Richt not firing Martinez after 2008 was a defensible move. The 08 D was wrecked with injuries, and it did manhandle Michigan State in the bowl game. It took 2009 to really expose Martinez’s shortcomings as a coordinator, and Richt made the tough call.
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Our defense had been in a steady decline every since CWM took over. Look at the numbers.
It is not defensible. It was obvious to everyone not drinking the cool aid that CWM defenses were subpar compared to CBVG defenses.
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Maybe Garcia should remind sos that he was the team’s QB the one-and-only time scu won the sec east. I doubt it would shut sos up, but it would be a good retort.
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“He’s just limited when it comes to some of the things you ask your quarterback to be.”
If we were at the races nursing some Coors it would have continued with “Bless his heart, the boy has the I.Q. of a 2×4. If my dawg had thumbs I could get him to do a 3 step drop and throw the ball better then this doofus”.
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I’m really hoping that Shaw wins the starting job, not so much because I think Garcia’s bad behavior is an embarrassment to the program but because I think Garcia has hit his peak on the field. Garcia was a RS Junior last year and made some of the same mistakes he was making as a freshman, so I seriously doubt he’s going to be much better this year. I simply expect more of the same: some really great performances balanced by some mediocre and bad ones, which all equals a good-but-not-great QB. If Shaw can prove to be better than that, he will give us a chance to improve on the 9-5 record. It’s hard for me to see us winning more than 9 games with Garcia, particularly if Lattimore gets hurt here and there again, which is bound to happen if we’re going to run him 30 or 40 times in each big game.
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Good post. I have said before that I would prefer to coach a mediocre QB to coaching Garcia. As long as that QB was consistantly mediocre. You can game plan for mediocre, it is hard to gameplan when you don’t know if your QB is going to play great or suck. I guess you just plan for the worst and hope for the best. Garcia probably hasn’t invested enough time in doing his homework. He doesn’t impress me as being a student of the game.
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Oh, I think he’s a student of the game all right, just not the game of football.
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Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
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When I heard about Garcia’s antics in Atlanta he went up considerably in my eyes.
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If Spurrier thought Shaw could get it done at all Garcia would be gone. Spurrier is putting up with this because unlike at UF where he could pull another all conference qb off the bench he knows that Garcia is his best shot at winning.
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Spurrier may have needed Garcia enough the past 3-4 years to put up with his childish behavior but Shaw should be far enough along by this fall. I am surprised SOS doesn’t cut ties with Garcia now and kick him to the curb. What an immature little punk he has been his whole career. Shaw seems to have the better skills without the drama.
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What do you base that observation on?
I think if that were really the case, Garcia’s starting career would already be dead.
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Granted, very limited observations, and comments I have heard from those closer to the SC program about his natural skills. He has a bigger arm, but is unquestionably less experienced. Can’t say he has “poise” due to lack of playing time but these same people feel he will be less likley to panic as much as Garcia has done throughout his career. I feel SOS felt the same way and is why he put him into the fire at JH during the 4th quarter. That unquestionably set Shaw back a bit and wasn’t Steve’s smartest move. If Shaw has a good spring it could really be a contest since it wouldn’t take much to get the Gamecock faithful behind someone besides Garcia.
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I’m going to back up what Mac is saying here. I know the joke among Georgia fans is that Spurrier would put his left tackle under center if it meant being able to pull his starting QB after a boneheaded play, but I really don’t think Spurrier would talk up Shaw the way he does if Spurrier didn’t think Shaw had a chance to get into the lineup. Shaw probably wasn’t as ready last year as Spurrier thought, and I think a lot of the talk may have been designed to get Garcia to quit dragging his feet, but I do think Shaw is a quality QB.
In limited playing time last year, Shaw appeared to have better accuracy than Garcia, he made much better reads on the option play, and he’s faster. He lacked Garcia’s ability to read defenses and Garcia’s size and ability to make physical runs. He’ll never be as big as Garcia, but you have to believe that he doesn’t have a long way to go to be able to surpass Garcia in terms of QB smarts. Shaw appears to be a much better student of the game. I also think that his ability to run the option play could help him a lot. That’s essentially our bread-and-butter play now, and while we did well with it last year, the success came no thanks to Garcia, who couldn’t run a well-read keeper to save his life. A Shaw / Lattimore combo on that play could really bolster our running game.
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And for all the talk about Garcia, and the reality show type figure he is, the reality is SC’s fate is in the hands of Jeffries and Lattimore. They can make any QB look decent and are the dominent players at their position in the SEC. I would put SC as a slight favorite in the East over UGA at this point. Dawgs may have the edge in the schedule, but they will have their hands full in the critical tie-breaker game at Sanford in week 2. Yeah, it’s still too early for predictions but that is all we can do until late August and we see who has stepped up, who is injured, suspended, etc.
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Re: Lattimore and Jeffery, that’s actually part of the reason I think Shaw might be a better option. If we’re going to continue being a running team with Lattimore getting lots of carries on the read option play, and Shaw could help open up our read-option attack, then going with Shaw will all the better allow us to embrace the team’s new identity. As far as Jeffery is concerned, it’s no mystery to any skilled observer that Garcia’s stats are partially just a function of having Jeffery to throw the ball to, and Shaw would have the same benefit. Again, though, what I’d really like to see is how well our read-option works with Shaw under center. He seems to have an intuitive understanding of that offensive approach and he’s fast, so he could make a big difference there. He’d run for a lot of yards, reduce the beating Lattimore is taking, and open things up for Lattimore, as well.
As far as USC-UGA goes, I’ll have to admit that I’m less confident about the game than I was last year. I like our chances OK, but I’m also worried that some of our defensive losses are going to make us vulnerable to a team like UGA early in the season. With the game in Athens, that’s cause for concern. We’ll see. My lack of confidence may just be my difficulty adjusting to the favorite role, which isn’t where USC has traditionally found itself.
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You realize how weird that scans in the context of a Spurrier-coached offense. Times sure have changed.
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For sure. I’ll take it though. Anything’s gotta be better than the offenses we fielded before Lattimore arrived.
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