For years now fans and announcers around the SEC have been asking, “how long has that Carrera guy been at South Carolina?” On Thursday, they learned that they may be seeing him for a few more years.
Michael Carrera, star of the South Carolina basketball team, announced via his twitter (@USCBasketballGuy2002) yesterday that he will be returning for a fifth season. After averaging 14.5 points and 7.7 rebounds per game this year, his fourth for the Gamecocks, Carrera was set to graduate in May and presumably try his luck playing professional ball. However, his plans seemed to have changed.
The NCAA immediately responded to Carrera’s tweet and released their own official statement informing Carrera that he has already used all four seasons of his eligibility and can no longer play sports competitively on the collegiate level.
I tracked Carrera down while he was working his day job as a sales clerk at Forever 21.
“They told me that if I work here, I’ll never grow old”, he said, adding that staying in college as long as possible is a goal of his. While there he informed me that he intends to fight the NCAA on this issue just like when he battled the Kentucky big men for rebounds, a battle he also lost.
“Everyone tells me that once I learned to shoot the three pointer, I became a different player. Since I’ve only been consistently shooting threes for one season I think that means I deserve an additional three years of eligibility.” Carrera added that he has already filed paperwork that would legally change his name to Cichael Marrera to help further differentiate him from his old self.
Head basketball coach Frank Martin got in on the action as well and sent out a tweet of his own. In his typical fashion Martin needlessly abbreviated words and used improper punctuation in an effort to save space, which took a toll on the content of the tweet. After the entire staff of the Daily Gamecock reviewed the hunk of seemingly incoherent nonsense, we can speculate that the tweet says something about how Carrera should probably not do this, but your guess is really as good as ours.
This is the third incident that the men’s basketball program has had involving the NCAA in the past few weeks, coming on the heels of the team being snubbed from the NCAA tournament as well as the now infamous attempt of Chick Fila trying to send a real, life-size parachuting cow into Colonial Life Arena, as opposed to the toy cows they usually throw from the rafters, which this paper wrote about last week. Updates on all three stories can be seen on DailyGamecock.com.