South Carolina may have been 2-5 to open the 2020 season, but not everybody expected the firing of head coach Will Muschamp this past Sunday.

Count former Gamecocks head coach Steve Spurrier among those surprised by the move. The Head Ball Coach recently gave his thoughts on Muschamp’s firing during an interview with ABC Columbia’s Mike Gillespie, indicating that he may not have thought it was deserved.

“Yeah, I was surprised that he was let go Sunday night,” Spurrier said in the interview. “His record is almost exactly like Coach Lou Holtz’s was when he was there for his five, six years or whatever. I don’t know what all happened, but I guess the new president said, ‘We need to make a change.’ His record was pretty consistent with most South Carolina coaches over the years. We were fortunate in 2009 and ’10 to recruit some really, really top players like Marcus Lattimore, Stephon Gilmore. But his record, if you compare it to all the other coaches in South Carolina history, I don’t think it was that bad.”

Muschamp went 28-30 while leading the Gamecocks. However, 22 of those wins came during his first three years. Since the start of the 2019 season, South Carolina is 6-13, showing that the program may have been trending in the wrong direction.

Spurrier was right that Muschamp’s record with the Gamecocks was similar to that of Holtz, who went 33-37 while at the helm from 1999-2004. Neither Muschamp nor Holtz were as successful as Spurrier, who went 86-49 from 2005-15 while leading South Carolina to some of the most successful seasons in program history.

Now, Mike Bobo has taken over as the Gamecocks’ interim head coach and will have his chance to lead the program (at least in the short term).

South Carolina will play its first game of the post-Muschamp era on Saturday as it hosts Missouri at 7:30 p.m. ET on SEC Network Alternate.