The coaching carousel is prone to produce wild rumors every year, but usually those rumors vanish into thin air after a job is filled. It's rare you'll see a rumor pop to life only after a search has taken place and a coach has been hired.
That's what happened during Paul Finebaum's show today. Finebaum had on Gene Sapakoff, the longtime columnist of record in South Carolina at the Charleston Post & Courier.
As you'll see below, Finebaum asks a standard question about the early days of the Shane Beamer era in Columbia and, given the steering wheel, Sapakoff takes a hard right turn into fantasy land.
Finebaum: Your impression so far of Shane Beamer at South Carolina?
Sapakoff: Well Paul, I'll tell ya, I like him a lot more than, say, Tom Herman who, I've been told, called Ray Tanner, the South Carolina athletic director, I'm not going to say begged for the job but my sources say that he was quite interested.
"This is false," Michelle Herman tweeted, six minutes after Finebaum's show tweeted the clip (see below).
The interesting thing is Herman and South Carolina danced together the last time the job opened, in 2015. There were reports South Carolina came to a deal with the then-Houston head coach that obviously never came to fruition.
"We had a meeting at the start of the week, and he said, 'I'm not going to talk to anyone about any other job or be in communication with anyone, because I have a task at hand,'" Houston receiver Demarcus Ayers said at the time. "I don't know what other jobs he'd been talked about with. But he for sure told us he killed the South Carolina thing. He told us this is where he wanted to be, and if anything happens, it's not gonna be right now.
"This is important to him right now. I think the guys really appreciated that."
Five years later, the coach South Carolina ultimately hired is now gone and Herman is fighting tooth and nail to hang on to his dream job at Texas.