University of South Carolina officials say they're willing to work with football coach Steve Spurrier -- but they won't completely rewrite the school's admissions policies to do so.

School officials defended the university's admissions standards a day after Spurrier harshly criticized the school for denying admission to two would-be football players who met minimum NCAA standards.

"Every student that's NCAA-qualified is not necessarily going to succeed and shouldn't be accepted," Bill Bearden, South Carolina's NCAA faculty athletics representative, told The State newspaper of Columbia.

Bearden and three other tenured professors make up the university's special admissions committee, which, according to provost Mark Becker, reviewed more than half of the Gamecocks' football signees. The committee denied admission to three of the players, one of whom was eventually admitted on appeal, The State reported.

Spurrier was angered that receiver Michael Bowman of Wadesboro, N.C., and Arkee Smith of Jacksonville, Fla., were cleared by the NCAA to enroll, yet were turned down by the university.

"Hopefully, I truly believe this is the last year this is going to happen, because I can't operate like that," Spurrier said on Sunday. "I can't operate misleading young men."

Spurrier signed a contract extension, which included a raise of nearly a half-million dollars, that ties him to South Carolina through 2012. However, he said if things didn't change on admissions "then I have to go somewhere else, because I can't tell the young man that he's coming to school here," then not have him admitted.

Bearden told The State that the special admissions committee thoroughly reviews each applicant, including grades, records, test scores and classes taken, and admits students who have a realistic chance of succeeding.

Athletic director Eric Hyman said university president Andrew Sorensen is agreeable to "tweaking" the school's athletic admissions process, and Hyman anticipates bringing proposed changes to the university's board of trustees, the newspaper reported.

But Hyman also told the newspaper that the school must remain mindful of the NCAA's academic progress rate -- a measure of how well schools retain athletes and keep them academically eligible to play sports. Schools that fall below minimum standards are subject to scholarship reductions.

"It's a heightened sense of concern, so therefore you have to have people who can ultimately make it," Hyman said, according to the newspaper.

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