You can always tell when Steve Spurrier thinks he has a good team. He starts talking about everything but how good his team might be.
The Gamecocks must be pretty good, because the Old Ball Coach is up to his old tricks.
On moving the Georgia game from the second week of the season to Oct. 6, Spurrier told ESPN.com, "I don't know. I sort of always liked playing (Georgia) that second game because you could always count on them having two or three key players suspended."
But Spurrier tweaking Georgia is a sun-comes-up-in-the-east kind of story. The swipe he took at Nick Saban this spring was something new.
"He's got a nice little gig going," Spurrier said on the Dan Patrick Show of the coach with three BCS championships in the last 10 years. "(He's) a little bit like (John) Calipari. He tells guys, ‘Hey, three years from now, you're going to be a first-round pick and go.' If he wants to be the greatest coach or one of the greatest coaches in college football, to me, he has to go somewhere besides Alabama and win, because they've always won there at Alabama."
Now Spurrier is pushing SEC commissioner Mike Slive's buttons, suggesting that the SEC divisional titles should be determined by the records within the East and West and not the overall conference records.
"Your division champ should be decided on division games," Spurrier said. "Last year, it wasn't fair for Tennessee and Florida. They both played LSU and Alabama. Us and Georgia didn't, so us or Georgia almost had to win the division simply because of the schedule."
As much as he would like for everyone to believe that statement is his way of being magnanimous to Florida and Tennessee, what really rankles Spurrier is the fact that the Gamecocks beat Georgia in Athens last year but the Dawgs won the East by virtue of running the conference table afterward.
When pressed, he admitted as much, saying of Mark Richt's squad, "I give them credit for beating everybody after they lost to us. But they had Ole Miss and we had Arkansas. That was the only difference in the SEC schedule between us two."
In fact, the Gamecocks went undefeated in the East, which, under Spurrier's proposed system, would have given them another shot at the SEC title.
Slive is skeptical and probably pulling his hair out at yet another Spurrier verbal carpet bombing.
"We certainly can discuss it, but an SEC football game is an SEC football game," Slive said. "Sitting here first blush without a lot of thought, it would be very hard to decide some games are more valuable than other games."
Before the SEC spring meeting last year, Spurrier floated the idea of paying players. That got him a lot of headlines, but won him no friends in the Destin, Fla., conference rooms. This proposal (along with his jabs at Georgia and Alabama) should dampen his popularity at the May meetings once more.
But he obviously doesn't care. That's how you know: the Old Ball Coach thinks he's sitting on a pretty good team.
