Will Muschamp talks SEC at Macon TD Club

Former SEC player, coach and coordinator Will Muschamp spoke at the Macon Touchdown Club this week, delivering anecdotes and opinions on football to the crowd Monday with expert pacing.

It’s not often that college football coaches are also expert storytellers, but Muschamp knew how to spin a yarn and get some serious laughs from the audience of college football faithful. The former head coach of the Florida Gators and South Carolina Gamecocks covered a great deal of topics at the Methodist Home For Children and Youth.

The most frequent topic was Muschamp’s relationships and stories about his iconic SEC compatriots. The Georgia alumnus had plenty of stories about UGA coach Kirby Smart, Bulldogs offensive coordinator Mike Bobo and even former Alabama and LSU coach Nick Saban.

Muschamp’s stories began — after jokes about being booed in Florida and playing a lot of golf since leaving the coaching business — with a Macon native. Muschamp got his big break coaching when Chris Hatcher hired him to be the defensive coordinator at Valdosta State in 2000.

About a month and a half after Muschamp was hired, the coaches interviewed Kirby Smart — then just a walk-on UGA player who had recently been cut by the Indianapolis Colts — to be their secondary coach.

Muschamp claims the eventual Georgia legend made a rather funny mistake back when his coaching career was just beginning.

“During the interview there’s a bear defense … you can really play that middle of the field coverage with 11 players. Because you only play 11 players on defense, right? Well, they don’t in Canada and they didn’t in the interview, because Kirby Smart put 12 players on the field in that interview,” Muschamp said, grinning. “He denies it happened, but it did.

“I could make a lot of money telling stories about Kirby, but I won’t do that.”

Muschamp made sure not to forget about the players and coaches being honored at the club. Westside’s Spoon Risper spoke about his final season as the Seminoles’ head coach. Three Northeast players — Kortnei Williams, Maurice Wilson and Demonta Dunn — earned player of the week awards.

“Congratulations to the players of the week,” Muschamp said. “And I’d be really remiss if I didn’t recognize Edgar Hatcher, a Hall of Fame coach who’s here.”

At other times Muschamp pulled back the curtain on college football myths and “isms.” He spoke about halftime adjustments — sometimes real but other times imagined, although Muschamp said all coaches are trying to adjust constantly and not just at halftime — and whether coaches pay attention to the media cycle.

“You’re kind of in a bunker. My wife can tell you, I would go in the office about 4:45 in the morning. I normally walked out about 11:00 or midnight,” Muschamp said. “You’re not sitting in there watching ESPN at work … This is the first fall in 30-something years I’ve sat there and actually watched it.

“You don’t really hear it, but it’s hard because your family hears it.”

The former Bulldog heaped praise onto Smart, Bobo and others like D.J. Durkin, the interim head coach at Auburn. He predicted that current Georgia defensive coordinator Glenn Schumann will become a head coach at some point, calling him one of the brightest defensive minds in the game.

Perhaps the best tale Muschamp told, though, was of his opinion on the loudest stadium environment.

While he was coaching at Florida, Muschamp’s Gators faced the Tennessee Volunteers at Neyland Stadium in Knoxville. It was unbelievably raucous, the coach said, and one of his assistants pointed out early on that Tennessee appeared to be piping noise into the stadium — an illegal tactic, Muschamp and his staff knew.

The assistant recorded a video of speakers by the sideline that were covered with rugs. The rugs would move and shake, indicating that the speakers were rattling with noise. 

The head coach chose not to worry about it in the first half, although he was steamed at his players jumping the snap too often. Once the second half rolled around and Muschamp had a spare minute during a timeout, though, he brought it to the officials.

“He looked at it and said, ‘You’re right.’ And I said, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ He said, ‘I’m not going to do anything about it,’” Muschamp recalled. 

Instead, the official told him to take it up with someone called the “game administrator.”

“So I’ve been in this league for 20 years, I’ve been a head coach for four years. I’ve never in my life heard of a game administrator,” Muschamp said, remembering his incredulity.\

As it turned out, the “game administrator” was a Tennessee employee, so Muschamp stopped the effort to elevate the complaint. His ire got some laughs from the Macon Touchdown Club crowd.

The real punchline came when Muschamp was coaching at South Carolina. The Gamecocks played in Knoxville a few years later, taking a close contest down to the wire. Tennessee had the ball near the end zone with only a few seconds left.

Even after running two plays, one second remained on the clock, much to Muschamp’s dismay. He went over to an official to complain, and the official agreed with his take — but then started to explain that he couldn’t do anything to fix the game clock.

Muschamp cut him off.

“Let me guess,” the head coach said, “game administrator?”

The crowd laughed. The official responded, “How did you know that?”

“When you play in Tennessee,” Muschamp answered, “this kind of thing happens.”