Tusing: In case you missed it last week, stands for Tuesday musing. From now on you’ll just have to assume I misspelled something.
Word just came down that Stephen Spinella and Ramon Galloway have decided to leave the South Carolina basketball team and transfer.
First, let me address Spinella. I have to admit, I bought in to Spinella as a kid who was a sleeper, but was going to gradually improve over his four years at USC and ultimately hit some big shots for us in meaningful games as a Junior and Senior.
Unfortunately, after a 15-point effort early in the season against Radford, he completely disappeared. He lost confidence in himself, and ultimately lost the confidence of Darrin Horn. His brief appearances in SEC games in 2011 were downright painful. He looked lost, and quite frankly a little frightened.
I wrote at the end of the season that we needed some attrition from this team, and Spinella was the obvious choice. His leaving is not a surprise.
Galloway leaving, on the other hand, is quite a surprise, and an unpleasant one. Horn made a “disappointed” comment in regards to Galloway’s season after the final home game, but I didn’t see this coming.
Galloway was never going to be the star of this team, but he seemed to fit the sixth man role quite well, providing instant offense at times (but also went into a prolonged slump late in the season) and good energy while on the court. He is only going to get better, and I hate that it won’t be in a South Carolina uniform.
Unfortunately South Carolina basketball appears to be a sinking ship, and Galloway decided to grab a life raft while he could. You would hope an average team at the beginning of the year would be slightly above average by the end of the year. Instead, we became arguably the worst team in the SEC over the last month of the season.
Damien Leonard better be the second coming of Ray Allen, or we’ll be scouring the NCAA tournament in 2012 for our next head coach.
Other tusings:
- With my bracket in shambles – and don’t tell me yours is too, because it can’t be as bad as mine – I’m pulling hard for Butler and VCU to continue to move on. If they don’t, we’ll just be relegated to watching the rich (Kansas, UNC, Duke, OSU) get richer.
- So, any news on Stephen Garcia lately? This dude continues to get hammered in the media, and yet he is on pace to break all kinds of career records at USC. In ten years, we’ll be looking back fondly and remembering how much fun Garcia was to watch, and his warts will make him all the more endearing.
- Nooooooo, the AJC has no agenda in the “Lorenzo Mauldin oversigning saga”, none at all!
- Think Steve Spurrier isn’t having fun being the coach at South Carolina? Then read this. I haven’t fielded a single question lately about how much longer he’ll be our coach. I wonder why?
- From T-bone – is Martay Maddox the next Arturo Freeman? Or the next Taquiy Muhammed?
- Also from T-bone – shorts or skirts look better on women than jeans. But women wear jeans all the time now. What’s up with that?
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