South Carolina SEC Media Days: Muschamp is cool, Bentley speaks his mind and a startling discovery about Hayden Hurst

Thursday finally saw the South Carolina Gamecocks take the vaunted podium at SEC Media Days, and as expected most of the quotes were standard coach speak jibberish.

There were a couple of talking points of note, which will be illustrated in tweet form below so you don’t have to sift through the dark bowels of Twitter to search yourself. If there was one thing discussed at the podium which garnered some national attention, it involved a player who isn’t even on South Carolina’s roster anymore.

Former running back David Williams’ transfer to Arkansas was brought up to head coach Will Muschamp early on, to which he responded the Razorbacks “got them a good one.” This shouldn’t sound like a big deal, but transfer destination have been a bit of a controversy in the SEC and college football abroad.

Most recently it was Kansas State head coach Bill Snyder who found himself in hot water by blocking a transfer by Corey Sutton, but Gus Malzahn and Nick Saban have been guilty of this offense too. It was almost a year ago Alabama defensive back Maurice Smith wanted to transfer to Georgia after he graduated from Alabama, but Saban reportedly blocked it.

Bobby Petrino has been guilty of blocking intraconference transfers as well, but in the case of Williams he went to Arkansas without a fuss from the South Carolina staff. It shouldn’t be a big deal, but Muschamp is actually earning praise for this.

Muschamp had some fun at Media Days too. It’s not often you see the SEC coaches break character like this — even Bret Bielema and Ed Orgeron were uncharacteristically buttoned up during their press events. But Muschamp decided to have a little fun with the writers asking him questions, especially his old one from Florida.

If anything Muschamp is winning back the hearts of some media members who may have thought his hire was a questionable one at South Carolina. If you’re a fan of the Gamecocks it would have been nice to see your coach acting like a lighthearted human being rather than a robot programmed to give out meaningless quotes.

Of the three players who came to media days — Deebo Samuel, Jake Bentley and Hayden Hurst — Samuel garnered the most press not for what he said but what he wore. Samuel showed up in a suede suit that looked like it jumped out of a worm hole from Studio 54 in 1976. Check it out:

Other than his suit Samuel mentioned the fastest player on the team was freshman Shi Smith, the team started taking yoga classes together and mentioned Muchamp was “kind of scary” during his first workout with the team.

Bentley came out and addressed his way of not mincing his words when he speaks to the media. This probably was spurred on by Bentley saying “Clemson wasn’t that much better than us” when interviewed by Fox Carolina. This predictably drew the ire of many Clemson fans, who wasted no time throwing shade and ridicule Bentley’s way. Specifically in the form of this video made by some Clemson fan who clearly has too much time on his hands:

Fair enough. But we’ll respond to this video with this data:

But I digress, Bentley made it clear at Media Days “he says what he means and isn’t going to take anything back”. Bentley also came to the defense of Alabama quarterback Jalen Hurts when asked about the latter’s throwing ability, calling it “crap” that Hurts can’t throw the ball.

As far as Hurst was concerned, this video and the following NSFW image are all you need to know about what happened to him at media day.

The ad in question is in this link here. Who cares about anything else at Media Days anymore? Hurst’s image was stolen for use of a sex toy. That is without a doubt the story of the offseason. Props to Jake Weaver for uncovering this startling story.