July 22, 2015

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University of South Carolina head ball coach Steve Spurrier addressed the media on Wednesday inside the lobby at the Rice Athletics Center. Watch his comments in their entirety here on GamecocksOnline.

Spurrier’s Remarks: There’s been some questions in the last week, two weeks, maybe the last month, about Coach Spurrier’s age and how much longer he’s going to coach at South Carolina. Last year at this time I was 69 and we were 11-2 and there was no question about my age. Now that we’re 7-6 we got some enemies out there. I got some guys out there that don’t like me out there talking and writing and its part of the game. I’m really speaking to the South Carolina Gamecocks, this is just a message to them, I want to talk about this situation and then I don’t want to talk about it any more throughout the year.

We have to understand that we have some enemies out there. It happened to me early at Florida, when we started kicking everybody’s butt pretty good down there, all of a sudden they didn’t like the Florida coach. They used to talk nicely about the Florida coach because he didn’t beat anybody much – he beat them enough.

When I got down there and beat Georgia two or three times, a guy from Atlanta wrote `Spurrier will flame out, he won’t make it. He’s arrogant, he’s cocky, he can’t recruit because nobody likes him. He won’t last long. Well, after beating them 11 out of 12 he quit writing that, and then our local newspaper lets that same guy put something in our paper the other day, talking about I’m too old, we’re on the descent and we’re in trouble. That’s allowing our enemies to write about us in our paper and I don’t like that.

As most of you know, I’m a big believer in Attila the Hun’s book, he said it very simply: `It’s a simple truth that the greater your accomplishments, your victories, the greater opposition, torment and discouragement your enemies will throw in your path. Expect it and don’t become a victim of it.’ I’m telling our fans to expect those people that are our enemies to talk bad about us. We’ve finally won enough that they’re trying to convince us that my age has something to do with it. Jeff Guy, our team doctor, told me that physically and mentally I’m about a 55-year-old guy. I can still call the plays, I can still run the show, and I plan on coaching a long time.

Some people never have enemies. Some coaches never win enough to have anybody mad at them. I guess we’ve won enough to have some people mad at us.