When Steve Spurrier was hired as head football coach at South Carolina in November of 2004, he had one simple question.

“Why not us?” he asked at his introductory press conference. “Why not the South Carolina Gamecocks? Why can't we get to the top of the SEC?”

At the time, those questions were clearly rhetorical.

But entering his fifth season on the job, Spurrier doesn’t seem to be any closer to finding an answer.

While the Gamecocks have finished above .500 in each of Spurrier’s four seasons, they’ve yet to win more than eight games and haven’t finished better than fourth in the SEC East since his first year in Columbia. Perhaps most disturbingly, USC has yet to finish a season ranked in either major poll during his tenure.

As the 2009 season approaches, Spurrier sounds like a guy who’s starting to realize the Gamecocks still aren’t all that close to reaching the pinnacle of college football’s best conference.

“We certainly hope to win a conference championship around here the next three or four years,” he said at USC’s media day earlier this month. “If our quarterback play and our offensive line play come around, we may be pretty decent this year.”

Maybe it’s just me, but phrases like “the next three or four years” and “we may be pretty decent” don’t sound like the Ol’ Ball Coach we came to know and love when he was ripping off seven SEC titles at Florida.

They sound more like the comments of an old ball coach who is beginning to feel he’s bitten off more than he can chew.

If nothing else, Spurrier has recruited well at South Carolina — bringing in highly ranked class after highly ranked class — but even he has openly admitted recently that most of those classes haven’t lived up to their billing, and at this point, one has to at least begin to wonder if he’ll even be around to see the current group of freshmen graduate.

One of my favorite activities during the long, dry months between football seasons is to pick up as many of the preseason magazines as possible, if only because — even if some of them hit the racks in June — it makes me feel like the season is right around the corner.

Typically, those publications do little more than just that, feed our football cravings and are long forgotten by the start of fall camp.

But with kickoff finally upon us and Carolina set to begin its 2009 campaign next Thursday at N.C. State, there’s one small segment from one of those magazines, Lindy’s Southeastern Conference preview, that has stuck with me.

It’s from a feature called “Opposing Coaches View,” presumably a way for the SEC’s coaches to dish dirt on one another without their names being attached to their comments.

Here’s what one of those anonymous coaches had to say about the Gamecocks:

“I don’t know if they’ve got a quarterback that can win that many ballgames. … I don’t see them being a very good football team. And I wouldn’t be surprised if (Spurrier) called it quits after this season.”

Some may view all this as piling on, so let’s make one thing very clear — Spurrier’s tenure at South Carolina has been anything but a failure.

The Gamecocks have been ranked as high as No. 6 in the nation under Spurrier, and the 21 wins he recorded in his first three seasons in the Garnet & Black are more than any previous Gamecock coach.

Still, Carolina lost arguably five — Kenny McKinley, Jared Cook, Jasper Brinkley, Emanuel Cook and Captain Munnerlyn — of its best six players from a year ago, and for those of us who watched USC lose its final three games by a combined total of 118-30, it’s hard to envision the Gamecocks improving on their 2008 total of seven wins.

Clearly, Spurrier didn’t come to South Carolina to hover just above the .500 mark.

And one has to wonder, for a coach that once won a conference title at Duke, how much longer Spurrier can stomach dwelling in the SEC cellar.