Jim Romenesko has a post on why Ron Morris won’t be covering South Carolina football this year. It seems Steve Spurrier isn’t a fan of Morris and has called him out on several occasions.

The 68-year-old football coach won’t have a repeat performance this year, though, because The State has told Morris that he can no longer write about University of South Carolina Gamecocks football. (He’s been writing a lot about Clemson lately.)

“The publisher of the paper has removed Ron from any coverage of the football program, which down there is akin to the Washington Post not letting Dan Balz write about government,” one of Morris’s former colleagues tells me. “Effectively, he’s being forced out at the behest of the football coach, with the publisher not standing up for him.”

Morris declined to talk to me, but others familiar with the situation — including former University of South Carolina and State staffers — told me how The State’s publisher made his veteran columnist agree in writing that he would never again write about Gamecocks football or talk about the USC program on TV and radio shows.

“It was a journalism restraining order,” says one of Morris’s ex-colleagues.

Romenesko did reach Spurrier about the situation.

“Ron Morris just wrote stuff that wasn’t true about me and I reacted,” Spurrier told me over the phone last Thursday. “I was fine with him the first five or six years here, and then he would write stuff that wasn’t true.”

Did he complain to The State’s publisher? I asked.

“I complained to the world about him. I complained to Gamecock Nation on my radio show. But don’t put that on me” that Morris can no longer write about Gamecocks football. “He is responsible for that.”

Of course, a football coach doesn’t have that kind of power, right?