COLUMBIA, S.C. — As South Carolina prepares to head to Nashville to face Ole Miss Wednesday night in the SEC Tournament, head coach Frank Martin is dealing with questions about his future in Columbia. The speculation is understandable given the team's major struggles this year with just six wins on the ledger. Martin has defended his tenure noting the Final Four run from 2017, six consecutive non-losing seasons until this season which has obviously been unlike any previous year due to COVID-19 and it's toll on the coach personally and the team with two pauses in team activities.
“This is the first time we’ve had six non-losing seasons since the 70s," Martin said.
"The last five years, we have the third-most SEC wins—third most—in the SEC. Everyone says one postseason in nine years. Yeah, you can say that. That’s what’s on paper when you write it down. But when I got here nine years ago, you could have hired Coach K, Pat Riley and Phil Jackson as the staff. If they cheated, they would have fixed the problem a lot quicker. But we didn’t cheat. When you build things without cheating it takes time. The first three years we had no chance of being a postseason team. Maybe at the end of my third year we could have been an NIT team but weren’t an NCAA team," Martin said.
"Then the following year we gave the school the winningest season in the history of the university. Then the following year, just for the hell of it, we gave the school another record for number of wins. I told you guys the other day I don’t need to explain a Final Four. After the Final Four we hit the reset button. I took the grad transfers to get through the year,” “we got really young the following year and redid it. Then last year we were a postseason team again. Unfortunately, just like every school in the country we couldn’t finish our book last year. We were deprived of that opportunity, but we were a postseason team. Now you take this year and it’s been a complete you-know-what show. It’s been incredible."