Plenty of great coaches come and go, winning games and receiving acclaim.
In the history of the Southeastern Conference and the long existence of college football, better coaches than Stephen Orr Spurrier have walked the earth. Urban Meyer and Nick Saban are the two men who most readily come to mind in the present tense. Bear Bryant and a fellow named Bobby Bowden — the man who never lost to Spurrier in Tallahassee, Florida — rate as more accomplished coaches from the past.
In college football and in every other sport, plenty of all-time legends — players and coaches alike — perform at the highest level. They do what they do best, and it’s more than enough for a lifetime. Yet, it’s all we remember them for: the spectacular plays or the uncanny ability to coach a juggernaut, reloading every year without missing a beat.
Yet, for almost all of the truly special people who define themselves as college football’s most revered winners and achievers, that’s where our memories end.
We do remember the other three coaches on the Mount Rushmore of the SEC — The Bear at Alabama, Johnny Vaught of Ole Miss, and General Robert Neyland of Tennessee. However, we remember them simply as great coaches.
Bear Bryant is a somewhat exceptional figure, and the stories about him certainly possess a larger-than-life quality, dating back to “The Junction Boys” with Texas A&M in the 1950s, before his rise to power and immortality at Alabama. Yet, as charming and memorable as The Bear was, he still fit into a very specific mold, that of the old-time Southern ball coach who preached defense, field position, and the kicking game. He did reinvent himself by adopting the wishbone in the 1971 season, setting the table for a second dominant era at Alabama in the 1970s, but the larger principles at the heart of his approach remained the same.
Bear Bryant was, in many ways, college football’s Vince Lombardi. He was the coach who won because he taught his players how to make simple plays — at the heart and essence of fundamentally sound football — better than any other team. Yes, recruiting better had a little something to do with his success, but Bryant’s teaching chops were second to none, and that unceasing pursuit of discipline made him, in many ways, the football coach’s football coach, the man who embodied for generations the model of how to teach the college game to the 18-year-olds who entered the schoolhouse door.
On the final day of the 1980s, an entirely different sort of football coach entered the SEC in that capacity, after having won the Heisman Trophy in the league as a player, 23 years earlier.
Many coaches come and go, winning games and receiving acclaim… but there was, is, and always will be only one Stephen Orr Spurrier.
He was not and is not the greatest coach in the SEC or the history of college football — that honor belongs to The Bear — but unlike Paul W. Bryant, the many legends of the past, and the iconic superstar coaches of the present day, Steve Spurrier left behind a legacy that was about so much more than the wins and losses.
Spurrier, who retired from coaching on Monday at age 70, was not just an SEC legend and a man who joins Bryant as the most iconic coach in the histories of two different SEC schools; he was a man who — for all his considerable flaws, easy as they were to see — lived life and coached football on his own terms, not on the terms handed to him by the sport and its most prestigious conference in the Deep South.
Spurrier won’t be remembered simply as a great coach; he will be remembered as a man who set a very healthy example (the word “healthy” is literally and figuratively true in this case) for his brother coaches. He will also be remembered as a man who was unflinchingly honest, stubborn to a fault, and deeply funny.
Steve Spurrier didn’t bow to the conventions of his sport or his times. He, more than 99.9 percent of the men who have ever coached college football — especially in the SEC — was his own man, not the man the surrounding culture expected him to be.
Spurrier did it his way, and it is for that reason he is — truly — an American original, one of the great sportsmen of our time and a man whose imprint on college football stretches far beyond the field itself.
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We have already mentioned The Bear — Paul W. Bryant — but we now turn to the other great “Bear” in American sports history: Jack Nicklaus.
It was in 1965 that Nicklaus tore through the famed Augusta National golf course to win the tournament Bobby Jones created, The Masters. Jones — one of the seminal figures in the history and development of golf — knew what it was like to be the dominant figure of his time. Yet, when seeing The Golden Bear roar through the Georgia pines, Jones memorably said, “He plays a game with which I am not familiar.” It was as though Nicklaus was reinventing golf for generations.
This, quite simply, is what Stephen Orr Spurrier did to — and most certainly for — the Southeastern Conference in college football.
If you looked at Spurrier’s career from 1997 through this year at South Carolina, you would see a career best described as “decent.” You’d see those three 11-win seasons with the Gamecocks, an SEC title and BCS bowl wins at Florida, and a few other accomplishments of note. You’d also look at his tenure at Duke and notice an ACC championship, a feat which will always rise to the top of the list when his coaching achievements are measured. Yet, the period of time which made Steve Spurrier a legend — the period of time in which he built his on-field coaching legacy — was that seven-year glory road in Gainesville, 1990 through 1996.
It was the time when one man, simply by being himself and not adhering to “The Way Things Had Always Been Done,” put the SEC at his feet, with one very small interruption.
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In 1990, the powers that be in the SEC denied Florida an official conference championship, due to the misdeeds which preceded Spurrier’s arrival in Gainesville. Yet, in that season, Florida was most definitely the best team in the SEC. Spurrier didn’t need a year to get acclimated — he won right away. That grip on the SEC is hard to imagine today or at any other point in college football history. Coaches are usually pretty good about adjusting to what an opponent does. They’re usually hell-bent on figuring out what it is a creative adversary is devising, and formulating the defense which can stop it.
Yet, that’s the essence of Steve Spurrier at his height with the Gators in the 1990s: He was so different, and so clearly reveled in being different, that a stodgy, conservative, “three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust” league immersed in the old ways simply refused to adjust. An SEC which proudly hewed to your grandfather’s way of winning a football game simply could not bring itself to adapt to what Spurrier was doing.
From 1990 through 1996, the only time Florida was not the best team in the SEC was 1992, and even then, the Gators ended an SEC season having done just about everything they could to succeed. The Gators were in an in-between place in terms of their offensive line and clearly did not have the horsepower of every other Spurrier team from that seven-year reign. Yet, when facing Gentleman Gene Stallings’s best Alabama team — the one team between Bear Bryant and Nick Saban to win a national title in Tuscaloosa — the undermanned Gators still took the Crimson Tide to overtime.
The Emory and Henry.
The Swinging Gate.
The pitch-and-handoff version of the flea flicker, as opposed to the running back pitching the ball back to the quarterback.
These and other tricks were commonly unsheathed by Spurrier, all within the larger “Fun and Gun” passing framework which looked like space travel to the other teams in the SEC (which consisted of 11 non-Florida teams in 1992 with the arrivals of South Carolina and Arkansas, creating the split-division conference formed by the birth of the SEC Championship Game). Alabama’s best team from that time, playing on friendly soil in Birmingham, could barely beat Spurrier’s least-talented team.
That was the only time in seven years the Gators were not the SEC’s best.
In every other season from 1990 through 1996, it was a Tim Russert Election Night whiteboard: Florida, Florida, Florida.
Football is a team game and a massive production, requiring a lot of coordination and organization among three units (offense, defense, special teams), numerous assistant coaches, and dozens of players. Yet, it is entirely true that Florida’s near-total ownership of the SEC for seven years was the product of one man, a man the league needed more than half a decade to finally figure out and reel in.
We haven’t seen anything like it in college football since — Nick Saban has four national titles, but uninterrupted dominance is not something he achieved. (Auburn stood in the way of that on two occasions, in 2010 and 2013.) Urban Meyer won two national titles at Florida, but he burned out on coaching before returning to the sport at Ohio State, and Saban bested him in the 2009 SEC Championship Game.
It’s not so much that Spurrier owned the SEC for a seven-year period. No, that’s not even the point with him. What really shines through is that Spurrier changed the way a sport was played in the region which took — and still takes — that sport more seriously than any other part of these United States. This change wasn’t rooted merely in football acumen, either — it was a product of a man and a mind who insisted on being different. That, truly, is Stephen Orr Spurrier’s lasting contribution to college football.
The fact that Spurrier’s individuality produced so many memorable quotes, and a refreshing willingness to say what everyone else in the room was thinking, is certainly notable. For many college football fans under the age of 25, this is what the man is most centrally remembered for: Hatin’ Ass Spurrier. This is one of the many ways in which Spurrier — unlike the other 99.9 percent of great coaches who have come and gone before us — leaves behind a legacy far greater than just the championships and the wins.
Yet, that expansive legacy, which will be discussed more and more as the week unfolds here (and at every other college football publication in this country), must always be connected to one thing: the refusal to accept the way everyone else coached, taught, and spoke about football. While the pack moved in one direction, Steve Spurrier took the road less traveled — in his on-field tactics, but also in his postgame pressers and his offseason media appearances. When the rest of the SEC, in the early 1990s, wanted to preserve a long-established way of football life — an inclination redolent of the past in realms far beyond football — Steve Spurrier pulled the conference, kicking and screaming, into modernity.
Maybe Spurrier so distracted and unnerved opposing coaches with his bluntness, and with combative tendencies which — when not harnessed properly — produced a very ugly man, a man who behaved downright shamefully in his interactions with Ron Morris of The State newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina. As said earlier, Spurrier did carry some enormous flaws, some dark inclinations that can’t and shouldn’t be swept under the rug in an appraisal of who he was as a sportsman in the public spotlight.
Yet, those flaws should be retained in the writing of Spurrier’s story precisely because they were just as honest and open as the man’s virtues. Steve Spurrier — in his best moments, and also at his worst — was always and fully himself in a way his brother coaches seldom were. It is in this respect that Spurrier — not the greatest coach who ever lived or the most successful coach of his time — achieved the kinds of victories which a win-loss column or a national championship tally can’t fully capture.
Yes, Steve Spurrier — removed from elements such as personality, individuality and authenticity — was a great football coach who did a lot of winning. Yet, that we are remembering him for who he is as a person and how he went about his business speaks to something equally if not more significant: Stephen Orr Spurrier, a true American original, made roughly a quarter century of college football coaching an enjoyable experience of competition, not the oppressive and stressful burden it was and is for so many of his peers.
Jack Nicklaus played a game with which Bobby Jones was not familiar.
Steve Spurrier coached a form of football with which the SEC was not familiar, but he also carried himself — on and off the field — in a way none of us will ever forget.
Forging a legacy of achievement is one thing; showing coaches that it’s possible to win and enjoy the ride, all while being your most authentic self, could be Steve Spurrier’s greatest contribution to the sport he leaves behind as a head coach.