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Should Holtz be held accountable?
The article is below, but should coaches be held accountable in some way for the problems they left behind????? Switzer at OU, Hotlz at South Carolina??
Blame game
Since Lou Holtz retired as USC’s coach, nine of his former players have been arrested and another was kicked off the team for drug use. The question: Should Holtz be held accountable?
By JOSEPH PERSON
Staff Writer
Shortly after announcing his retirement in November, Lou Holtz climbed behind the wheel of his 1990 Ford Tempo and drove off for Orlando, handing over a program he described as “pretty solid” to his friend and golfing companion Steve Spurrier.
At several of his final media appearances at USC, Holtz rattled off the names of players he recruited and was leaving behind, suggesting Spurrier would have plenty of talent to get started. But Holtz left behind something else: a legacy as a lax disciplinarian whose authority was undercut because of his catering to star players.
In the four months since Holtz retired, nine of his former players have been arrested, including five who face felony charges related to theft or burglary. A 10th player, 2004 leading rusher Demetris Summers, was dismissed from the team after a second failed drug test.
Spurrier has not blamed Holtz or his staff for the off-the-field problems, saying Holtz’s players became “my guys” when he took over. But in interviews with more than a dozen USC players and coaches from the Holtz Era, many of them said Holtz is accountable for the environment in which a spate of criminal activity has taken place since he left.
“Toward the end, especially the last two years I was there, it was very obvious because he just kind of let a lot of guys get away with a lot of different things that he never did before,” said former offensive guard Jonathan Alston, a captain on the 2004 team.
“A lot of times it wasn’t big things, it was small things. But small things lead to big things, which are coming out now.”
The other criticism directed at Holtz by some of his former players and coaches is that he was not thorough enough in checking the backgrounds of the Gamecocks’ recruits. Among the five players charged with felonies, one had a criminal record before coming to USC and another was sent home early from a recruiting trip to Alabama because of poor conduct.
“I don’t think he ran a loose ship,” said Ryan Brewer, who played for Holtz from 1999-2002. “(It was) more to the fact that he recruited some guys that weren’t natural leaders.”
How Holtz feels about what has gone on at his old school is unclear. He has not returned repeated phone messages left by The State with family members. East Carolina coach Skip Holtz, a former Gamecocks assistant and Lou’s son, declined comment.
USC athletics director Mike McGee, who hired Holtz and Spurrier, would not assign blame.
“None of this is coach Spurrier’s doing,” McGee said, “but it’s also, I think, difficult to start assessing blame.”
DOUBLE STANDARD
Schooled at Ohio State under Woody Hayes, Holtz had a reputation nationally as a no-nonsense coach. During the first five years of his six-year USC stint, Holtz did not allow players to wear their hair long or grow facial hair.
Players who missed class were required to show up for early-morning runs. If a pattern of behavior problems or poor classroom performance developed, Holtz would put players on contracts specifying requirements.
“And if they failed to live up to it, then action was taken,” said McGee, adding that some players were suspended or transferred to other schools after breaking contracts.
But there seemed to be a double standard for the Gamecocks’ best players under Holtz, beginning with Williamston tailback Derek Watson. The first blue-chip recruit to sign with Holtz, Watson had a series of off-the-field missteps. While Watson was suspended for the 2001 Outback Bowl after crashing a teammate’s car and later was dismissed after a marijuana arrest, he had more than one second chance before his dismissal.
“A lot of times they would let him get off here or there (and say), ‘OK, we let you by this time...’” said offensive tackle Na’Shan Goddard, a rising fifth-year senior.
Brewer said Watson, his former roommate and friend, made poor decisions that “weren’t reprimanded as much as some of the players would have liked.”
“You can’t have two sets of rules. Sometimes it seemed that way, but we weren’t always in there to see what’s going on,” Brewer said.
But in other cases, players could see clearly what was happening. Former fullback Brandon Schweitzer said Summers, another highly touted tailback who broke Watson’s state rushing record, would miss mandatory team functions without consequence.
Schweitzer, who transferred to Gardner-Webb in 2004, recalled an instance in 2003 when Summers missed a team meeting.
“Holtz told us flat out that there would be pretty harsh punishment for anybody that didn’t show up. (Summers) didn’t come, and it was a slap on the wrist,” Schweitzer said. “Holtz addressed it in a team meeting right after that, and it was almost like, ‘Where were you?’ And (Summers) just said, ‘I had other stuff to do.’ And coach Holtz was like, ‘Well, be there next time.’
“And I know darn well if that had been me, my butt would have been in a sling. I’d have been in trouble.”
Goddard remembered the incident as well.
“We were waiting on the discipline (of Summers), and we didn’t get it,” Goddard said. “We were like, ‘Man, we can’t do nothing about it. You’re the coach.’”
Players tried to do something about it. After the team’s leadership council complained to Holtz about the preferential treatment given to certain players, Holtz responded by suspending eight players for the second session of the 2004 summer school for missing classes and offseason workouts. Among those suspended were five key players — Summers, tailback Cory Boyd, quarterback Syvelle Newton, safety Jamacia Jackson and defensive end Moe Thompson.
The players were required to pass a conditioning test before returning to the team. But when Summers failed the test, he was given two additional chances before he passed it.
“That’s the one thing I want more than anything, is to be a team. And I don’t care who’s on that team,” Holtz said at the start of two-a-days. “It’s not going to be about stars.”
When USC opened the season less than a month later at Vanderbilt, Jackson and Thompson started the game, while Summers, Boyd and Newton received significant playing time.
An assistant on the ’04 staff, who asked not to be identified, said “a lot of things slid with some of the better players” under Holtz.
BACKGROUND CHECKS
Holtz gets $40,000 per appearance as a motivational speaker, but his speeches in the homes of recruits were free. Large gatherings of friends and relatives often would show up to meet Holtz when he scheduled home visits across the state. His message was straightforward.
“Their motto was that they recruited people and not players,” said defensive tackle Preston Thorne, who played for Holtz from 2000-2004.
But Brewer said Holtz did not always practice what he preached in recruiting. “He got great athletes, but he didn’t get guys that were leaders,” said Brewer, a popular former player who lives in Columbia.
The Gamecocks began relying more heavily on junior-college transfers, who generally are athletes who cannot meet Division I academic requirements coming out of high school. USC’s 2003 signing class included seven junior-college transfers and two players who needed a year of prep school to qualify.
Among the junior-college signees that year was Woodly Telfort, an offensive lineman who had been arrested for grand theft auto in 2001 near his Miami hometown. Dave Roberts, the Gamecocks’ recruiting coordinator at the time, said Holtz’s staff was not aware of Telfort’s criminal record.
Roberts, who was responsible for the bulk of the junior-college recruiting, lost his recruiting coordinator title to Rick Stockstill shortly after signing day in February 2004.
Telfort was one of six players arrested in January in connection with the theft of $18,000 worth of property from Williams-Brice Stadium on Nov. 23, when the team learned it would not go to a bowl game because of its role in a brawl against Clemson. Freddy Saint-Preux, Telfort’s teammate at Dodge County (Kan.) Community College, also was charged in the stadium incident.
In January 2004, a week after a recruiting visit to USC, defensive line prospect K.T. Mainord was sent home during his visit to Alabama because of misconduct, said Alabama assistant and former USC coach Sparky Woods.
Woods said Alabama pulled its scholarship offer to Mainord. Holtz called Alabama coach Mike Shula to discuss the incident. McGee said school officials talked to police in Alabama and in Mainord’s home state of Tennessee before deciding to continue recruiting Mainord, who signed with the Gamecocks a few weeks later.
Earlier this month Mainord and Thompson were arrested on multiple counts of first-degree burglary and petit larceny charges after allegedly breaking into two dorm rooms of female students and stealing electronics equipment. Thompson had a history of on-campus conduct problems before his arrest, according to sources.
Backup receiver David Smith, the most recent USC player arrested, faces six charges stemming from a violent episode at his girlfriend’s apartment in Cayce on March 16. Four months earlier, authorities told Smith he was considered a trespasser at his girlfriend’s apartment.
McGee said Holtz and his assistants conducted background checks on recruits when they believed it was appropriate.
“I’m sure that you could always consider certain revelations that have occurred and feel it would have been helpful if there were those that had been checked,” McGee said. “I don’t have the list of those that were checked and dropped from recruitment, but I do know that occurred.”
Roberts, the former recruiting coordinator, said Holtz’s staff talked often about a recruit’s background.
“You just tried to cover everything,” Roberts said. “In some instances, if a coach doesn’t tell you, you don’t know. In most cases, you have a pretty good feel for what you’re doing and who you’re taking. We talked about all that.”
NOT HOLTZ’S PROBLEM
In Holtz’s defense, Brewer said he learned several “life lessons” under Holtz, who taught a leadership and character-building course in the spring of 2004.
Also, there were several occasions when Holtz acted decisively to discipline a player. In 1999, before his first season at USC, Holtz dismissed top running back Troy Hambrick for a violation of team policy. McGee pointed out that the three most well-known backs from the Holtz Era — Hambrick, Watson and Summers — all were dismissed with eligibility remaining (although Summers’ automatic dismissal came after Holtz was gone).
“I think he tried to back what he was saying in a lot of cases,” said Schweitzer, who served on the leadership council before transferring. “But I think where he failed — and I hate to talk about Lou Holtz, legend, like this — is he tried to make too many exceptions for too many people. I think he realized there were people in his program that he needed on his team, but at the same time he knew that within his system of values they weren’t going to make it.
“In order to keep them there, he had to adjust what he believed in. He made exceptions for those guys, and I think that was the starting point for the downward spiral.”
Alston, the offensive lineman from Goose Creek whose career ended this past fall, believes Holtz’s decision to ease his restrictions on hair and facial hair and relax his gameday dress policy might have set a bad tone for his final year in Columbia.
“I’m not saying it was a big reason, but you have your rules and you stick to them,” Alston said. “He was in the game for thirty-some-odd years. If you have your rules, stick to them.”
Even those who agree that Holtz’s disciplinary system was faulty do not believe he is the sole cause of USC’s four-month stretch of arrests, suspensions and dismissals.
An assistant coach on the ’04 staff said USC players lost focus the week of the Florida game when the first reports surfaced that the school had contacted Spurrier about the possibility of replacing Holtz. Emotions in the Gamecocks’ locker room ran higher the following week when Holtz told the team he was retiring, and they finally boiled over with the fourth-quarter brawl at Clemson that resulted in 12 suspensions between the two schools.
Two days later, when McGee informed the team the school was pulling out of a bowl, six players responded by taking several framed action photographs and thousands of dollars worth of laptop computers and projectors used for video study.
“I don’t think it was coach Holtz’s fault. I don’t think it was coach Spurrier’s fault. We just made some definitely poor decisions in a hurtful time,” Goddard said of the stadium thefts. “We did want to go to a bowl game. But you can’t blame not going to a bowl game on all this. I just think it’s poor decisions, plain and simple.”
Quarterback Dondrial Pinkins and linebacker Rod Wilson, two of the players accused of taking photos of themselves, were captains on the ’04 team that finished 6-5 following consecutive losing seasons. Roberts said neither player had been in trouble previously.
McGee was asked whether he felt at all responsible for the stadium thefts, which occurred hours after Holtz retired but before Spurrier was introduced the next day.
“I feel responsibility for everything that transpires within the athletics department,” said McGee, adding that the irony is that the school had extra security in place at the stadium that evening.
CHANGES AFOOT
Spurrier, who joined Holtz for two days of golf at Augusta National a year ago, said he has not talked to his predecessor since the off-the-field issues began to mount.
“That’s not his problem. That’s my problem,” Spurrier said. “I’ve said before, I inherited everything here, so I’ll take responsibility.”
Spurrier has a more stringent recruiting philosophy when dealing with prospects considered academic risks. Spurrier backed off several recruits who were marginal students and signed only two junior-college transfers — linebacker Mike West and defensive back Brandon Isaac, both of whom were originally recruited by Holtz’s staff.
“We have made an effort in recruiting this year to do a better background check. Not necessarily what kind of person you are, but also academically,” Spurrier said. “We’ve tried to recruit guys that have a better chance of sticking for the four or five years.”
McGee said school officials are considering conducting more criminal background checks on recruits, an idea that Oklahoma and other schools also are studying.
As for dealing with players already on campus, Spurrier has grabbed his team’s attention with a clearly defined disciplinary system. At one of his first meetings, the former Florida coach spelled out the types of behavior that would get a player kicked off the team.
Then he followed through with it, dismissing Summers and indefinitely suspending Telfort, Thompson, Mainord and Smith, none of whom is expected to return. Among those shown the door were arguably the Gamecocks’ most visible offensive and defensive players in Summers and Thompson.
“He really set the example by who he kicked off the team — our stars,” Goddard said. “He’s really putting his foot down. He’s letting us know, in a sense, that if he is going to kick off his star player, he’s going to kick off anybody.”
The article is below, but should coaches be held accountable in some way for the problems they left behind????? Switzer at OU, Hotlz at South Carolina??
Blame game
Since Lou Holtz retired as USC’s coach, nine of his former players have been arrested and another was kicked off the team for drug use. The question: Should Holtz be held accountable?
By JOSEPH PERSON
Staff Writer
Shortly after announcing his retirement in November, Lou Holtz climbed behind the wheel of his 1990 Ford Tempo and drove off for Orlando, handing over a program he described as “pretty solid” to his friend and golfing companion Steve Spurrier.
At several of his final media appearances at USC, Holtz rattled off the names of players he recruited and was leaving behind, suggesting Spurrier would have plenty of talent to get started. But Holtz left behind something else: a legacy as a lax disciplinarian whose authority was undercut because of his catering to star players.
In the four months since Holtz retired, nine of his former players have been arrested, including five who face felony charges related to theft or burglary. A 10th player, 2004 leading rusher Demetris Summers, was dismissed from the team after a second failed drug test.
Spurrier has not blamed Holtz or his staff for the off-the-field problems, saying Holtz’s players became “my guys” when he took over. But in interviews with more than a dozen USC players and coaches from the Holtz Era, many of them said Holtz is accountable for the environment in which a spate of criminal activity has taken place since he left.
“Toward the end, especially the last two years I was there, it was very obvious because he just kind of let a lot of guys get away with a lot of different things that he never did before,” said former offensive guard Jonathan Alston, a captain on the 2004 team.
“A lot of times it wasn’t big things, it was small things. But small things lead to big things, which are coming out now.”
The other criticism directed at Holtz by some of his former players and coaches is that he was not thorough enough in checking the backgrounds of the Gamecocks’ recruits. Among the five players charged with felonies, one had a criminal record before coming to USC and another was sent home early from a recruiting trip to Alabama because of poor conduct.
“I don’t think he ran a loose ship,” said Ryan Brewer, who played for Holtz from 1999-2002. “(It was) more to the fact that he recruited some guys that weren’t natural leaders.”
How Holtz feels about what has gone on at his old school is unclear. He has not returned repeated phone messages left by The State with family members. East Carolina coach Skip Holtz, a former Gamecocks assistant and Lou’s son, declined comment.
USC athletics director Mike McGee, who hired Holtz and Spurrier, would not assign blame.
“None of this is coach Spurrier’s doing,” McGee said, “but it’s also, I think, difficult to start assessing blame.”
DOUBLE STANDARD
Schooled at Ohio State under Woody Hayes, Holtz had a reputation nationally as a no-nonsense coach. During the first five years of his six-year USC stint, Holtz did not allow players to wear their hair long or grow facial hair.
Players who missed class were required to show up for early-morning runs. If a pattern of behavior problems or poor classroom performance developed, Holtz would put players on contracts specifying requirements.
“And if they failed to live up to it, then action was taken,” said McGee, adding that some players were suspended or transferred to other schools after breaking contracts.
But there seemed to be a double standard for the Gamecocks’ best players under Holtz, beginning with Williamston tailback Derek Watson. The first blue-chip recruit to sign with Holtz, Watson had a series of off-the-field missteps. While Watson was suspended for the 2001 Outback Bowl after crashing a teammate’s car and later was dismissed after a marijuana arrest, he had more than one second chance before his dismissal.
“A lot of times they would let him get off here or there (and say), ‘OK, we let you by this time...’” said offensive tackle Na’Shan Goddard, a rising fifth-year senior.
Brewer said Watson, his former roommate and friend, made poor decisions that “weren’t reprimanded as much as some of the players would have liked.”
“You can’t have two sets of rules. Sometimes it seemed that way, but we weren’t always in there to see what’s going on,” Brewer said.
But in other cases, players could see clearly what was happening. Former fullback Brandon Schweitzer said Summers, another highly touted tailback who broke Watson’s state rushing record, would miss mandatory team functions without consequence.
Schweitzer, who transferred to Gardner-Webb in 2004, recalled an instance in 2003 when Summers missed a team meeting.
“Holtz told us flat out that there would be pretty harsh punishment for anybody that didn’t show up. (Summers) didn’t come, and it was a slap on the wrist,” Schweitzer said. “Holtz addressed it in a team meeting right after that, and it was almost like, ‘Where were you?’ And (Summers) just said, ‘I had other stuff to do.’ And coach Holtz was like, ‘Well, be there next time.’
“And I know darn well if that had been me, my butt would have been in a sling. I’d have been in trouble.”
Goddard remembered the incident as well.
“We were waiting on the discipline (of Summers), and we didn’t get it,” Goddard said. “We were like, ‘Man, we can’t do nothing about it. You’re the coach.’”
Players tried to do something about it. After the team’s leadership council complained to Holtz about the preferential treatment given to certain players, Holtz responded by suspending eight players for the second session of the 2004 summer school for missing classes and offseason workouts. Among those suspended were five key players — Summers, tailback Cory Boyd, quarterback Syvelle Newton, safety Jamacia Jackson and defensive end Moe Thompson.
The players were required to pass a conditioning test before returning to the team. But when Summers failed the test, he was given two additional chances before he passed it.
“That’s the one thing I want more than anything, is to be a team. And I don’t care who’s on that team,” Holtz said at the start of two-a-days. “It’s not going to be about stars.”
When USC opened the season less than a month later at Vanderbilt, Jackson and Thompson started the game, while Summers, Boyd and Newton received significant playing time.
An assistant on the ’04 staff, who asked not to be identified, said “a lot of things slid with some of the better players” under Holtz.
BACKGROUND CHECKS
Holtz gets $40,000 per appearance as a motivational speaker, but his speeches in the homes of recruits were free. Large gatherings of friends and relatives often would show up to meet Holtz when he scheduled home visits across the state. His message was straightforward.
“Their motto was that they recruited people and not players,” said defensive tackle Preston Thorne, who played for Holtz from 2000-2004.
But Brewer said Holtz did not always practice what he preached in recruiting. “He got great athletes, but he didn’t get guys that were leaders,” said Brewer, a popular former player who lives in Columbia.
The Gamecocks began relying more heavily on junior-college transfers, who generally are athletes who cannot meet Division I academic requirements coming out of high school. USC’s 2003 signing class included seven junior-college transfers and two players who needed a year of prep school to qualify.
Among the junior-college signees that year was Woodly Telfort, an offensive lineman who had been arrested for grand theft auto in 2001 near his Miami hometown. Dave Roberts, the Gamecocks’ recruiting coordinator at the time, said Holtz’s staff was not aware of Telfort’s criminal record.
Roberts, who was responsible for the bulk of the junior-college recruiting, lost his recruiting coordinator title to Rick Stockstill shortly after signing day in February 2004.
Telfort was one of six players arrested in January in connection with the theft of $18,000 worth of property from Williams-Brice Stadium on Nov. 23, when the team learned it would not go to a bowl game because of its role in a brawl against Clemson. Freddy Saint-Preux, Telfort’s teammate at Dodge County (Kan.) Community College, also was charged in the stadium incident.
In January 2004, a week after a recruiting visit to USC, defensive line prospect K.T. Mainord was sent home during his visit to Alabama because of misconduct, said Alabama assistant and former USC coach Sparky Woods.
Woods said Alabama pulled its scholarship offer to Mainord. Holtz called Alabama coach Mike Shula to discuss the incident. McGee said school officials talked to police in Alabama and in Mainord’s home state of Tennessee before deciding to continue recruiting Mainord, who signed with the Gamecocks a few weeks later.
Earlier this month Mainord and Thompson were arrested on multiple counts of first-degree burglary and petit larceny charges after allegedly breaking into two dorm rooms of female students and stealing electronics equipment. Thompson had a history of on-campus conduct problems before his arrest, according to sources.
Backup receiver David Smith, the most recent USC player arrested, faces six charges stemming from a violent episode at his girlfriend’s apartment in Cayce on March 16. Four months earlier, authorities told Smith he was considered a trespasser at his girlfriend’s apartment.
McGee said Holtz and his assistants conducted background checks on recruits when they believed it was appropriate.
“I’m sure that you could always consider certain revelations that have occurred and feel it would have been helpful if there were those that had been checked,” McGee said. “I don’t have the list of those that were checked and dropped from recruitment, but I do know that occurred.”
Roberts, the former recruiting coordinator, said Holtz’s staff talked often about a recruit’s background.
“You just tried to cover everything,” Roberts said. “In some instances, if a coach doesn’t tell you, you don’t know. In most cases, you have a pretty good feel for what you’re doing and who you’re taking. We talked about all that.”
NOT HOLTZ’S PROBLEM
In Holtz’s defense, Brewer said he learned several “life lessons” under Holtz, who taught a leadership and character-building course in the spring of 2004.
Also, there were several occasions when Holtz acted decisively to discipline a player. In 1999, before his first season at USC, Holtz dismissed top running back Troy Hambrick for a violation of team policy. McGee pointed out that the three most well-known backs from the Holtz Era — Hambrick, Watson and Summers — all were dismissed with eligibility remaining (although Summers’ automatic dismissal came after Holtz was gone).
“I think he tried to back what he was saying in a lot of cases,” said Schweitzer, who served on the leadership council before transferring. “But I think where he failed — and I hate to talk about Lou Holtz, legend, like this — is he tried to make too many exceptions for too many people. I think he realized there were people in his program that he needed on his team, but at the same time he knew that within his system of values they weren’t going to make it.
“In order to keep them there, he had to adjust what he believed in. He made exceptions for those guys, and I think that was the starting point for the downward spiral.”
Alston, the offensive lineman from Goose Creek whose career ended this past fall, believes Holtz’s decision to ease his restrictions on hair and facial hair and relax his gameday dress policy might have set a bad tone for his final year in Columbia.
“I’m not saying it was a big reason, but you have your rules and you stick to them,” Alston said. “He was in the game for thirty-some-odd years. If you have your rules, stick to them.”
Even those who agree that Holtz’s disciplinary system was faulty do not believe he is the sole cause of USC’s four-month stretch of arrests, suspensions and dismissals.
An assistant coach on the ’04 staff said USC players lost focus the week of the Florida game when the first reports surfaced that the school had contacted Spurrier about the possibility of replacing Holtz. Emotions in the Gamecocks’ locker room ran higher the following week when Holtz told the team he was retiring, and they finally boiled over with the fourth-quarter brawl at Clemson that resulted in 12 suspensions between the two schools.
Two days later, when McGee informed the team the school was pulling out of a bowl, six players responded by taking several framed action photographs and thousands of dollars worth of laptop computers and projectors used for video study.
“I don’t think it was coach Holtz’s fault. I don’t think it was coach Spurrier’s fault. We just made some definitely poor decisions in a hurtful time,” Goddard said of the stadium thefts. “We did want to go to a bowl game. But you can’t blame not going to a bowl game on all this. I just think it’s poor decisions, plain and simple.”
Quarterback Dondrial Pinkins and linebacker Rod Wilson, two of the players accused of taking photos of themselves, were captains on the ’04 team that finished 6-5 following consecutive losing seasons. Roberts said neither player had been in trouble previously.
McGee was asked whether he felt at all responsible for the stadium thefts, which occurred hours after Holtz retired but before Spurrier was introduced the next day.
“I feel responsibility for everything that transpires within the athletics department,” said McGee, adding that the irony is that the school had extra security in place at the stadium that evening.
CHANGES AFOOT
Spurrier, who joined Holtz for two days of golf at Augusta National a year ago, said he has not talked to his predecessor since the off-the-field issues began to mount.
“That’s not his problem. That’s my problem,” Spurrier said. “I’ve said before, I inherited everything here, so I’ll take responsibility.”
Spurrier has a more stringent recruiting philosophy when dealing with prospects considered academic risks. Spurrier backed off several recruits who were marginal students and signed only two junior-college transfers — linebacker Mike West and defensive back Brandon Isaac, both of whom were originally recruited by Holtz’s staff.
“We have made an effort in recruiting this year to do a better background check. Not necessarily what kind of person you are, but also academically,” Spurrier said. “We’ve tried to recruit guys that have a better chance of sticking for the four or five years.”
McGee said school officials are considering conducting more criminal background checks on recruits, an idea that Oklahoma and other schools also are studying.
As for dealing with players already on campus, Spurrier has grabbed his team’s attention with a clearly defined disciplinary system. At one of his first meetings, the former Florida coach spelled out the types of behavior that would get a player kicked off the team.
Then he followed through with it, dismissing Summers and indefinitely suspending Telfort, Thompson, Mainord and Smith, none of whom is expected to return. Among those shown the door were arguably the Gamecocks’ most visible offensive and defensive players in Summers and Thompson.
“He really set the example by who he kicked off the team — our stars,” Goddard said. “He’s really putting his foot down. He’s letting us know, in a sense, that if he is going to kick off his star player, he’s going to kick off anybody.”
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