Why did Steve Spurrier leave right now?

It’s really sad Steve Spurrier’s leaving college football.

It’s sad for the players, the fans, and the media, who miss one of the game’s best characters. Alabama fans, you can have Nick Saban. Ohio State fans, you can have Urban Meyer. But give me a Steve Spurrier – who won his fair share of things back in the day- anytime.

But while it’s sad that Steve Spurrier’s leaving South Carolina, South Carolina fans should also be pissed off.

The Head Ball Coach’s decision to leave this week was like a lot of the Gamecocks’ quarterback play this season: Utterly mistimed.

Steve Spurrier was a figurehead in Columbia. Steve Spurrier rescued a dead-and-buried college football team, resurrected it, beat Georgia and Tennessee consistently, scored a few monster upsets, and the fans loved him.

But during early October, while the rains were pouring and the floods were rising, leaving devastation to one of the prettier college towns in our fair country, Columbia needed Spurrier. They needed Spurrier to be a leader.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. A leader would have stuck around. Spurrier didn’t.

I still think back to the time when Spurrier was God down in those parts a couple of years ago. He couldn’t do any wrong. First it was Marcus Lattimore, and then it was Jadeveon Clowney. Heck, even Stephen Garcia made South Carolina fun. But then Clowney became the biggest thing on campus, and you could sense that there was an ego-battle between THE MAN WHO TOOK THAT MICHIGAN PLAYER’S HEAD OFF and THE HEAD BALL COACH. Clowney went, and the program never recovered. They were boatraced at home on Opening Day ’14 to Texas A&M while being pre-ranked in the top 6 (probably ‘cos of Clowney). They never really recovered.

On reflection, Spurrier should have really walked after the end of last season. Anyone could see at the SEC Media Days that his heart really wasn’t it. He knew that the team on the rise in the state of South Carolina was Clemson. He knew Georgia was still Georgia – how much they screwed up – and his attempts to get great players from the surrounding states were staying at home or going to bigger programs. Unfortunately, Spurrier went further and further into his shell, and then he disappeared like a rat off the sinking ship. He resigned to play golf mid-season, but his players can’t do that. His players have to stick by a program as it sits in pain, a laughing stock of the rest of the conference, but Spurrier didn’t. He simply walked, to the adulation of people who talk about his past achievements.

So why didn’t he go at the end of the 2014 season?

It wasn’t because he thought he could turn the Gamecocks around. It was ego. Pure and simple.

And when the Head Ball Ego couldn’t handle the losses, the terrible play (even though at LSU the team showed a bit more grit than expected) and the continuous questions of “When will Steve Spurrier retire?”,  he walked.

He walked because his team wasn’t good enough, and he wasn’t good enough to turn them around. And now he can go back to his golf game. Which I’m sure will improve.

And now South Carolina, Columbia as a city, the Gamecocks players and going to have to pick up the pieces.