South Carolina reaffirms support for Will Muschamp

A day after South Carolina President Bob Caslen made some tepid and intriguingly open-ended remarks about Will Muschamp’s status as head football coach, athletic director Ray Tanner released a statement of his own — possibly to settle everybody down.

The statement, in full, reads:

Today, I want to make it clear that Will Muschamp is our football coach and will be our coach going forward. President Caslen and I are fully supportive of his leadership and his development of student-athletes on and off the field. Coach Muschamp and our staff are dedicated to the success of Gamecock football. They have built a program where our team plays for each other and for our University, and they deserve our support. While we wish the outcome of some of our games would have been different, we are excited about the future of our program.

Scanning between the lines, the inclusion of Caslen here seems a little bit like a shot — I imagine Tanner wasn’t thrilled that he strayed from what has so far been the party line on Muschamp.

And to that end, yep, this is more of the same of what we’ve heard from Tanner on the subject. I don’t think this is the dreaded vote of confidence; it seems sincere, and like Tanner truly believes in Muschamp’s ability to turn things around.

Fans who are desperate for a change will likely have to wait at least one more year, but as we discussed in our post earlier this week, the Gamecocks’ performance against Texas A&M and especially Clemson could potentially be wildcards in this process. We’ll see, but for now, South Carolina seems pretty adamant about retaining Coach Boom.