Scott Satterfield Reacts to Report He Interviewed With South Carolina After Denying Interest

When ambitious college football coaches deny rumors, you normally take it with a grain of salt. Sometimes the rumors are true and sometimes they're not. Regardless, the coaches will always deny them, while simultaneously using them to build leverage with their current employers. So it was when Louisville football head coach Scott Satterfield's name came up quickly after South Carolina fired Will Muschamp:

This morning, we reached the portion of the story where the paywalled 247 South Carolina site reported that Satterfield interviewed for the job on Friday. You see tweets about it, you assume it's probably true, you wait for a second source to confirm.

Cameron Teague of the Louisville Courier-Journal caught up with Satterfield and asked him about it. Satterfield characterized it as a "conversation" rather than an interview and said his in-laws live two hours from Columbia and he felt an "obligation" to hear them out.

"I think, again, my intentions were never to leave or go anywhere else, but I thought I owed an obligation just to listen because of where it's at," Satterfield said. "That's it. Nothing else to read into that. I had no intention of entertaining it, I just wanted to listen to see what they had to say. That's the bottom line. I don't want it to offend anyone. We are committed to this program."

This happens every year and it effectively boils down to a game of mad libs. Insert program we're committed to here. The coaches always use the word "intend" or in this case "intentions," a word that has deliberate wiggle room. The door is open, but just a crack. We may see a little bit less of the coaching carousel this year as athletic departments grapple with budgets that were ravaged by the pandemic, but it's never going to go away entirely.