Stephen Garcia suspended (again), forcing us to bring up those wild Stephen Garcia rumors

South Carolina quarterback Stephen Garcia, dean of SEC signal-callers with 30 career starts heading into his senior season, was conspicuously absent from the Gamecocks' first spring practice session this afternoon, along with backup QB Andrew Clifford. Both were casualties of undisclosed violations of team rules, according to the Charleston Post & Courier, apparently "related to an incident during the team's bowl week" in Atlanta last December.

Post & Courier beat writer Travis Haney gets more specific on Twitter: The "incident" in question involved "alcohol" and "females" in a hotel room. Garcia and Clifford are slated to miss at least the first portion of the spring. Coach Steve Spurrier declined to elaborate.

So… how to say this? It's not that anyone necessarily disbelieved the outrageous, anonymously sourced rumors about Garcia's pre-Chick-Fil-A Bowl party routine that began leaking from less reputable corners of the web earlier this month. This is, after all, the "Palmetto Samson," the McConaugheyan rogue whose bro-tastic exploits earned him three strikes — for public drunkenness, keying a car and drunkenly setting off a fire extinguisher in a dorm, the latter just a few hours after being ticketed for kicking back with a cooler of beer outside the dorm —�long before he took his first snap in a Carolina uniform. His three-interception effort in the bowl game, a 26-17 Carolina loss to Florida State, was arguably his worst of the season. We are not aghast. Girls? Alcohol? Before a game? If it was unbelievable, it was at least partly because it sounded like exactly the sort of thing pretty much anyone on a random message board could make up. Too obvious to be true.

As for the details —�the number of girls, their various states of dress, the highway patrol, the StairMaster, etc. —�it's still buyer beware; the actual information available from a reputable news source (who doesn't name his source on the "women" and "alcohol" parts) is too murky to break out the Charlie Sheen references. But it's also just murky enough to make us wonder if this guy is actually going to make it all the way through his final season this fall. The latest incident marks his third spring suspension in five years. If law enforcement was involved, it will be for at least the fourth time. And though it's the first time he's been in any kind of trouble in three years as a starter (as far as we know), it's still a sign that the fun-fun-fun Garcia still lurks inside of the more mature exterior after four full years on campus.

There is no indication at this point that he won't be around for his fifth. (From Haney, actually, quite the opposite: He'll likely be back before the end of spring practice.) From here on, though, it's hard to see how our hirsute hero can survive another swerve from the straight-and-narrow. We're talking about zero-tolerance, Jim McMahon-at-BYU territory for the next nine months, aren't we? Steve Spurrier is no disciplinarian, but when the fundamental details of debauched fan fiction turn out to be more or less true, well, everyone has their breaking point.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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