Palmetto Proving Grounds

Edit: started to type & got called away. Others above summarized it pretty well!!:

Wright's column is one of the more insightful I have read on USC athletics. Here is a C&P.
He's absolutely correct when he says, "What you see on the surface - the forward progress in academic and athletic improvement - has never reflected the turmoil just below the surface."

Just think of the sizeable segment of Carolina fans who simply cannot stand Eric Hyman, no matter what success he has brought USC athletics. They were perfectly happy with 5-7 seasons, so long as they got their cheap Lower West tickets and their free parking around the stadium.

Tanner faces challenge
By Bart Wright
The Greenville News

Count me on the side of Ray Tanner, the University of South Carolina baseball coach who will be named the successor to outgoing director of athletics Eric Hyman this afternoon in Columbia.

There will be questions about the useful insight Tanner may have in the role since his last association with "athletic director" in his job description came 16 years ago at North Carolina State and it included the word "assistant" in the title.

Very few things in the environment of college athletics are similar today to the way they were in the mid-1990s. Steve Spurrier had, arguably, his greatest season as an SEC coach in 1996 when his Florida team won the national title with Danny Wuerffel at quarterback.

That same year, Brad Scott coached the Gamecocks to a 6-5 record, highlighted by a 34-31 win at Clemson.

The advice here is something you have heard many times, but it seems directly pertinent to the decision-makers at South Carolina and to the likeable Tanner, who will turn the baseball job over to assistant Chad Holbrook:

Be careful what you wish for.

"A lot of the heavy lifting has been done, I think that's fair (to say). There is a blueprint in place. There is a mechanism to move forward," Hyman said Thursday of his replacement, "but the job here is not done by any stretch of the imagination.

Unlike when he was leaving TCU and recommended Danny Morrison as his replacement, Hyman has made no such suggestions for who should replace him at USC, which might be because of the intensely specific demands of the job.

At South Carolina, internal politics have always driven the train. What you see on the surface - the forward progress in academic and athletic improvement - has never reflected the turmoil just below the surface.

Without mentioning it in so many words, it sounded as though Hyman's move to Texas A&M, despite all the accomplishments at USC, represents for him an opportunity to be more a part of a team and less a harried choreographer of varied interests fighting with each other.

So now it will apparently fall to Tanner to be the guy who absorbs all of the demands, all of the complaints of favoritism to one agenda or charges of inattention to another agenda that will surely come his way.

The new job means that, for a while, Tanner has to go out of his way to prove he isn't tilting the field toward baseball.

He will only have to do that for a while, until he gets used to it. Then, he will have to take that approach every day he's on the job.