Nov. 16, 2010

Head Coach Steve Spurrier met with the media Tuesday afternoon to preview Saturday’s home finale against Troy.

South Carolina head coach Steve Spurrier
Opening Comment
It was a wonderful weekend last week for the Gamecocks. For us to get a division championship for the first time was special for all Gamecocks. I want to thank the baseball team for getting it started and proving you can win championships at South Carolina. Congratulations to the men’s soccer team. Coach (Mark) Berson’s guys won the Conference USA tournament this past week. That was neat. Some good things are happening in all our sports. Hopefully we can continue and have success in Atlanta. The game this week, Troy, is a pretty good team. They’re 5-4. Larry Blakeney has been there 20 years and has a .700 win percentage. They do a good job there. We have to play well if we expect to beat Troy. Their quarterback, Corey Robinson, and two big times wide receivers (are good). One of those (wide receivers) is supposed to be a high draft pick. We’ll come out and give the ball to Marcus Lattimore and start running. We’re not going to throw three incompletes and move on. I want to tell our fans that we’ll come out running the ball and try to win a game Saturday at 12:20. We’re looking forward to it. We’re in pretty good position right now. Our team is very healthy. We have to finish strongly and see what else we can accomplish this year. Our team set a lot of high goals and most all of them are still in front of us. We’ll see how it goes these last three games. We’re looking forward to a full house Saturday. The weather is supposed to be beautiful. It’s senior day so we’ll introduce our seniors before the game and hopefully it will be a nice day for the Gamecocks.

On winning the SEC East
I really wanted to come to South Carolina one reason because they had not won much since 1969. Everything was out there to do for the first time. It was neat to accomplish that. Our guys played well. Certainly there were a few star players on our team last week. I’m proud of not only Marcus Lattimore but (also) Spencer Lanning. Making those three field goals – 49, 47, 41 – that’s big time kicking in a big time atmosphere. That was the most special part of the game, was that our guys really played and our star players played like stars. That’s how you win and that’s how we’ll have to keep winning if we make a strong run here. Again that’s only half of the SEC (title). We’ll worry about the other half in three weeks. This week is Troy and then Clemson and then the Auburn game in Atlanta.

On how important to South Carolina it was to win the SEC East
Winning the east is certainly big because we’ve never done it, but bigger is beating Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Florida in the same year. I don’t know if we ever did that at Florida. We may have (in the undefeated season) I guess, but for us to do that (at South Carolina) is also something very special. We’ll look back on all this when the season is over and move on. Obviously we had a tough loss at Kentucky and when that happened we were hoping maybe we could learn from it and learn how to finish games in the second half. I think in a way that may have helped us last week and in the Tennessee and Vanderbilt games that were tied at halftime. Sometimes you can gain a lot by losing, and looking back I think we did from that night in Kentucky.

On the seniors
They’re guys with wonderful attitudes. The first ones to come to mind are our captains Patrick DiMarco, Cliff Matthews, Ladi Ajiboye and Spencer Lanning. We have a few other seniors in that group, but we have a lot of other fourth year guys that want to come back next year. Travian Robertson and Rodney Paulk want to come back. That’s a compliment that guys want to stay around as long as they can now. It’s a great group. The commitment level through the summer and spring has been good. (Strength Coach) Craig Fitzgerald has been happy with the attitude of our entire team. Give those guys a lot of credit mainly for the commitment and attitude they’ve had.

On Marcus Lattimore
Marcus is a special young man as we all know, (and) not only his ability to play the game and run the ball, catch passes and block. A lot of people don’t realize he threw the block that sprung Stephen (Garcia) on the goal line. Marcus can do it all. He’s a very humble young man. Wonderful mom and dad. I see his mom after every game as we’re leaving the ballpark on the road. Certainly she was one of the happiest of all the happy Gamecocks last week. Marcus doesn’t say a lot, but his teammates obviously love him. He’s just a big reason we are where we are, no question. Without him running the ball I don’t know what our record would be right now.

On Patrick DiMarco
We gave Patrick a game ball. He played 74 offensive plays against Florida. Looking back I saw he pulled defensive ends several times where Marcus (Lattimore) runs around the middle. One or two touchdown runs were the same play. Patrick has played very well. Certainly being from Florida – his dad and uncle went there – it was a special night for Patrick DiMarco.

On recruiting
Getting back, the reason we’ve been fortunate to win the east is the ability to recruit. To recruit Marcus Lattimore, Alshon Jeffery, Stephon Gilmore and all these guys, the reason we’re able to do it is our facility improvement has been tremendous the last five years. I remember when (Director of Athletics) Eric Hyman came and made a statement that’s true. He said its expensive to build new facilities, but it’s more expensive not to. That’s the way life is. If you want to compete a the highest level, you have to jump in there and get your facilities as good or better as the competition. That’s where we are right now. The new baseball stadium and the success of the baseball team has helped us recruit a player that likes to play both sports. The facility improvement overall is what gives you a chance to compete at the highest level. We have a few more renovations and improvements to do. I’m sure our fans are starting to understand the importance of that now.

On team goals
We’re still pushing right now. We’re still pushing to see how many wins we can get this year and see what we can accomplish. We’re in the latter part of the season and most of our goals are still out in front of us. We’ll talk about that when it’s all over.

On his approach to coaching
I pretty much coach the same way every week. I know with the performance of our team some of you think I had a great week of coaching. I coached just the same against Arkansas and we played like crap. It’s up to the players. Our guys were ready to play last week. We had a live dressing room and locker room. The week before we were a bunch of dead players and it didn’t work out. As coaches we try to stay consistent. We’ll coach as hard as we can against Troy. Hopefully our players will want to come to the ballpark and play for our seniors and so forth. We changed a few things in practice (last week). We didn’t even talk about the Florida team until Tuesday. We just worked out a bit on Monday and tried to correct some mistakes. We change occasionally, but we’re pretty consistent the way I coach and our coaches coach each week.

On the team’s achievements
We’ll do our best to try and maintain whatever we have going when the season has ended. As we all know you’re usually about as good as your last game. We’re pushing toward the game this week. Then we’ll push for the next one and the next one. It’s neat to accomplish something for the first time. There are some other achievements still out there that we’re shooting for.

On how `2001′ gets everyone excited during pregame
When you have your mind on what you have to do to win the game, it doesn’t faze me a lot. It doesn’t faze the coaches that make a lot of decisions during the game. When you call the plays like I do, the head coach makes maybe 90 to 100 decisions in a game. It’s a neat song. I like the song, but I’m not so much into rah-rah as I’m into playing and getting our guys to play the game the way it’s supposed to be played. That’s what coaches are into, trying to get your players to play the bet they can. It’s a great one for the fans and I’m glad we have it. It’s just that coaches have other things on their mind at that time.

On the pass defense
Coach (Ellis) Johnson and Coach (Lorenzo) ward, we’ve been working hard on pass defense. I know it didn’t show against Arkansas much, but it did show the other night. We’re still not intercepting a lot of balls we get our hands on. Hopefully we can do that when we need to in some big games coming up as we go down these last three. We’ve changed our practice a little bit where we go first group against first group a lot more than we used to. Our pass defense looked better last week and we had an excellent pass rush. If we’ll make a strong finish we have to have a good pass defense.