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Tim Floyd tees off on Andy Enfield: ‘We’re not going to take it in the shorts’

Tim Floyd

UTEP coach Tim Floyd reacts watches during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game against Tulane in New Orleans, Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012. (AP Photo/Jonathan Bachman)

AP

The feud between USC head coach Andy Enfield and UTEP head coach Tim Floyd just keeps getting better.

Here’s a quick recap: Floyd was a candidate for the USC job -- a job that he left four years ago in the wake of O.J. Mayo’s “career” -- but Enfield got the job over him. A few months later, Floyd’s McDonald’s all-american signee Isaac Hamilton reneged on his commitment to the Miners, instead remaining in LA. Floyd was not-so-secret about the fact that he believed that it was Enfield and the USC staff that tampered with Hamilton.

That’s plenty of bad blood, but a reporter for Men’s Journal threw a match on the fire when he published quotes of Enfield taking shots at Floyd and El Paso. “Tim Floyd shows up every day at work and realizes he lives in El Paso, Texas,” Enfield told a room full of boosters. “And he’s pissed off that he didn’t get the USC job two months ago. I told him, ‘Tim, if I could have all this power to somehow convince a family to do this, why the heck didn’t the kid come last spring, when I first got the job?’”

Enfield tried to apologize on Wednesday night at a reception for the Battle 4 Atlantis, and the two coaching staffs got into it.

Well, Floyd finally got in front of a microphone, and he didn’t hold back. His comments, in full:

“I felt like there was some tampering going on with our McDonald’s All-American, Isaac Hamilton. Sure enough three months later he has USC on his Facebook page and backed out of his Letter of Intent. I called and we discussed it in a very serious vein. I said not to turn him in and they wouldn’t take him.

But we didn’t end up with him, and that was a lick.

And in addition to that I damn sure didn’t appreciate the comments he made last week publicly about the city of El Paso, Texas, where my grandparents were born and raised, where my father was born and raised and played at Texas Western, where I’ve lived 22 years in my life. It’s a fabulous city. My reaction yesterday was more about the city of El Paso than the previous part. I’ll just leave it at that.

Beyond that I’m not going to have any more comments down the road. But we’re not going to sit back and just take it in shorts. We’re not going to do it. We’re not going to do it. We’ve done it enough. His comments in that damn magazine were totally inappropriate. Totally inappropriate. So that’s all I’ve got to say, alright?

And as far as him saying he was just trying to apologize yesterday? It would have been really nice if he apologized about three weeks ago, when that magazine article came out. Call me and try to do it then. His timing wasn’t very good. It was too late.”


That’s awesome.

But unfortunately, Enfield’s USC team lost on Thursday. UTEP beat Tennessee. That means that any hope of getting those two onto a court together were dashed.

That could have been fun.