Welcome Back Ol’ #5 and Other Tusings

Stephen Garcia has been cleared to work with the USC football team this summer, and this is good news for South Carolina fans, and even better news for bloggers, radio show hosts and other media types who fashion themselves as college football experts.

For Gamecock fans, the news gives an instant boost to the prospects for the 2011 season – you return your battle-tested Senior quarterback, the third-leading passer in school history, and despite the occasional, ill-timed brain fart, a guy that will sell out on the football field to get victories.

For the blogger/media types, they get to jump on the righteous indignation train during the dead period and ride it all the way to September.   They’ll talk about five suspensions and how if he were a third-team offensive lineman he would’ve been gone a long time ago.  They’ll talk about how Garcia has single-handedly sullied Steve Spurrier’s reputation.  They’ll feign disgust as they talk about how college football needs to be “cleaned up”.

We got a small taste on Twitter from Tony Barnhart (dripped sarcasm when he tweeted he was “shocked” at the news of Garcia’s reinstatement) and David Pollack (called it “a joke”), and there will be much more to come, I’m sure.

And what do I say to that?

Screw ’em.

Wait, that’s not nearly forceful enough.

SCREW. THEM.

There, that’s better.

We possibly have the best football team we’ve ever had coming back in 2011, and we don’t really care if the college equivalent of Ken Stabler had a few too many pops before a bowl game or had the nerve to stand up for himself when being verbally flogged in public.

I rest easy at night knowing Steve Spurrier is at the helm of my program and he’s doing things the right way.  Say what you will about S.O.S., but there are two things you can be certain he is not – a liar or a cheat.

Garcia has pushed Spurrier to his absolute limits, no doubt.  And Spurrier has bent over backwards to give Garcia one more chance.  One more time.  Again.  But Stephen Garcia is no Maurice Clarett, DeAndre McDaniel, or (insert name of any number of Auburn players).  He has committed no violent crimes or shoved anyone down a flight of stairs or showed off a new Nissan 350Z around campus.

Given the nature of Garcia’s “crimes”, I’m perfectly fine with how this situation has been handled.  Now let’s get #5 tuned up for September, shall we?

A few other tusings this evening:

• I am not a Gamecock conspiracy theorist by any stretch.  I think the bozos that think everybody (the conference, the referees, the doo-doo ice vendors) is out to get us only make us look silly.  But this NCAA baseball bracket situation is just nuts.  How in the world do we get Stetson, N.C. State and Georgia Southern, while CTU gets UConn, Coastal Carolina and…this last one is hard to even type…SACRED HEART.  Who is the national seed here?  Garnet and Black Attack does an excellent job of summing up the ridiculousness here.
• My unpopular opinion only – I want no part of CTU in the Supers.  This last year of being able to stick it in the fat faces of their fans that we not only eliminated them from the CWS, but went on to win the National Title?  Pure gold.  If we fall to them in the Supers, which is entirely possible because they have been playing better baseball than us recently…I don’t want to think about it.
• Interesting to hear all these folks talk about “the hammer” that will be coming down on Ohio State once all the investigations into their program are done.  Will it really?  Didn’t “the hammer” come down on Alabama recently, and they turned around and won a BCS Championship?  Most schools seem to be handling NCAA sanctions quite well these days.

Have a good week and be sure to follow us on Twitter @rubrchickens and @thebucksterr.