Year in and year out, the Southeastern Conference is the most competitive of the major college football conferences.
Reflecting that intense competition, you may recall this item from earlier this year in which an Auburn University professor charged that another university professor and the Auburn athletic department had engaged in academic fraud for the purpose of ensuring the eligibility of a large number of Auburn football players.
Those competitive fires boiled over again a couple of weeks ago when an Auburn football team laptop containing the team’s confidential playbook turned up missing the week before Auburn played South Carolina in a big game. Although Auburn initially feared that South Carolina would end up with the missing playbook, it turned out that a homeless man had lifted the computer and it was returned to the Auburn team.
All of that leads to this Onion article that reports that the playbook was actually returned in, might we say, slightly altered form.
And, just to emphasize that truth is often stranger than fiction in the SEC, this State.com article reports that South Carolina head coach Steve Spurrier dressed down one of his assistant coaches during the post-game press conference after the Gamecocks won this past week against Kentucky. Spurrier followed up that dressing-down with this apology. At least I think that’s an apology.