South Carolina Spiked A TV Program Featuring A Slurring Steve Spurrier
Like most Division I head football coaches, Steve Spurrier is contractually obligated to appear on an eponymous television program every week following one of his team's games. This week's program—a recap of the Gamecocks' narrow win over UCF in Orlando Saturday—is very quickly being erased from existence. We want to know why.
The program, portions of which you can see above in poor quality, featured an unusually candid Spurrier dropping lines like "We gotta quit that crap if we're gonna be a good team this year." Gamecocks fans, in a now-deleted Cockytalk.com thread dedicated to watching The Steve Spurrier Show, noted that the coach was on-screen for only a few minutes of his own program, that he was slurring his words, and that he seems to have "gotten into the communion wine this morning." And, in the eyes of these South Carolina fans, at least, this wasn't just the usual HBC southernness:
Wow, yeah Coach is tipsy. I've watched this show the past 6 or 7 years. I've never seen him slur like that. Also pretty candid right there "We need to cut that crap out if we want to compete" Ha Ha! I bet Todd can smell the HBC's 80 proof breath too.
The Steve Spurrier Show is usually available for viewing on the South Carolina athletics video portal, but it was removed fairly quickly after it was posted. Yesterday's scheduled airing of the program on SportSouth was spiked in favor of an episode from two weeks ago.
We've reached out to South Carolina and SportSouth for comment. We'll update this post if they ever get back to us.
Update (10:37 a.m.): A source familiar with the matter informs us IMG, which produces The Steve Spurrier Show, directed SportSouth to replace yesterday's airing with a rerun for unclear reasons.
Update (11:02 a.m.): Steve Spurrier says he requested the show be spiked because he felt he was "too negative." With regard to his on-air appearance:
Asked if that was due to fatigue, Spurrier said, “I guess so.”
When asked if he was impaired in any way, he said, “I hope not.”
“Whether or not I have a few beers after every game for the past 29 years I don’t think I need to get into all that,” Spurrier said. “Most coaches that I know we probably do have few beers after ballgames after building up all week and so forth. But that was a draining day and I got too negative. I don’t like being that negative after a victory.”
