SEC Talk

At last our long national nightmare is over.

And the corrupt coach who left Tim Tebow off his SEC first team ballot has been outed, solving TebowGate for good.

(drum roll, please)

Steve Spurrier.

That’s right, Mr. (former) Gator Great himself is the culprit. The Ole Ball Coach had passed on his balloting duties to one of his assistants (in this case, his director of operations). The guy filled out the ballot, saw he already had 10 Gators on the first team, and decided to put Jevan Snead of Ole Miss at first team to change things up. He took the ballot to Spurrier, who scanned it, signed it, and forgot about it… until the whole mess broke this week.

Spurrier called up his assistant to make sure they weren’t the ones who had messed up the perfect vote. After a long pause, the truth came out.

Spurrier takes the blame for the “miscommunication” as he calls it. After all, it is his ballot, his signature at the bottom. And it’s called the Coaches Poll, not the Director of Operations poll.

First, no one should be that shocked. I realize that everybody’s favorite potential culprit was Tennessee’s Lane Kiffin (Kiffin brought his ballot with him to prove it wasn’t him, just in case no coach admitted the dirty deed). But Spurrier is the same coach who, every year, puts Duke in the top 25…

In football.

He says he does it out of loyalty to the school that gave him his first head coaching job.

So now the big question the media is asking is, which coaches actually vote, and which pass it off to subordinates.

I can tell you from my own experience, many coaches pass the buck on this one. I worked in sports information for many years, and virtually each and every one of my coaches asked me to do their ballots for them each week. Now, they might tell me who they wanted at #1, or who they wanted in the top 5, or where they wanted me to put their own team. But then it was left up to me. And I’ll be real honest here, that wasn’t really the best thing to do. I voted my best (usually), but the poll wasn’t that big of a deal to me beyond the team I worked for, and maybe a team that was one of our top rivals and I wouldn’t mind sinking a little lower.

So here’s what I take from TebowGate:

1. Spurrier made an honest mistake (which, by the way, he corrected by calling the SEC office and changing his ballot).

2. Polls aren’t worth the paper they are often printed on, because who knows who is really voting and what the agenda is?

3. Sports information staff and others who really do the actual voting should get a cut of the head coach’s salary.

Ok, I admit that last one is way off the wall, but hey, a former SID has to look out for the peeps still in the business!