Steve Spurrier does not want to be a politician.

But the USC football coach believes the state would be a better place to live if the Confederate battle flag were removed from the State House grounds.

Spurrier brought up the flag issue Friday while accepting a leadership award from City Year at the service group’s Ripples of Hope banquet at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center.

Spurrier said Saturday that he believed he was in an appropriate setting to voice his opinion.

“It would make us a more progressive, better state, I think, if the flag was removed. But I’m not going to go on any big campaign to have it removed. That’s not my position,” Spurrier said in an interview with The State. “But if anyone were to ask me, that would certainly be my position. And I think everyone in there, it was their position, too.”

Spurrier said it was “embarrassing” last year when someone waved a Confederate battle flag behind the set of ESPN’s “GameDay” before the Gamecocks’ home game against Tennessee.

“Some clown or some dude was waving that big ol’ Confederate flag right behind them about the whole time they were on,” Spurrier said.

[...]

Sen. Robert Ford, D-Charleston, who sponsored the bill that moved the flag from the dome to the grounds, said Spurrier’s timing was “100 percent wrong,” given the presidential campaigns coming through the state. Candidates have more important issues, Ford said. “He threw a monkey wrench in this campaign and I don’t like it,” Ford said. “It don’t look right. It don’t sound right. It don’t feel right.”

The 61-year-old Spurrier, who grew up in east Tennessee, said he did not know anyone in South Carolina who was in favor of flying the flag, “but I guess there’s a lot out there somewhere.”

Don Gordon is one of them.

Gordon, a state officer with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said Spurrier’s call for the removal of the flag was “the moral equivalent of calling our ancestors ‘nappy-headed hos.’”