Spurrier takes aim at all his doubters
Gators coach says he gets under the skin of some because he wins.
Editor’s note: This column originally appeared in The Post on Jan. 1, 2001.
GAINESVILLE — Some of you aren’t going to like this column. It’s about Steve Spurrier and that, for many, is reason enough.
FSU fans can’t find one good thing to say about the guy, particularly since he accused Bobby Bowden of condoning late hits on Danny Wuerffel in 1996. Miami fans don’t have much use for him, either, because they perceive over many years an arrogant and superior attitude in Florida’s dealings with the Hurricanes and Spurrier is a ready symbol for those traits. Broadcasters and sportswriters pester the head Gator for berating his players on the sidelines, for not always shutting down his hightech passing offense in lopsided wins and for toying with the psyche of his quarterbacks.
Put it all together and you’ve got a spectacularly successful college coach, the highest-paid
in America, who is not the least bit shy about annoying the heck out of everybody but unabashed Gator boosters. A few weeks ago, in an hourlong interview that covered a wide variety of topics without the slightest spark of resistance, Spurrier had a ready answer for why he gets under the skin of so many people.
“It’s because we’ve won a lot,” said Spurrier, who coached the Gators to the national championship in 1996 and last month clinched his sixth SEC title for a program that before his arrival in 1990 never had won a league championship. “I’m in the forefront out there, not sitting off to the side with my headsets on, looking like I’m listening. I’m not afraid to put my name on the line every play that’s called.”
Always with the needle, this guy, and that sometimes wears a little thin in a state where the Gators’ two rivals have combined for six national titles and could wind up this week sharing claim to another. Spurrier is the same today, however, as he ever was in his Heisman Trophy playing days or his pro coaching career with the Tampa Bay Bandits of the old USFL. He believes in himself and believes that his approach to winning football games, when custom-fitted with the proper athletes, is the best approach of all.
Basketball mentality
You’ll never find a top coach who thinks any other way. What separates Spurrier, however, is that he doesn’t behave like a traditional college football coach. He’s more like Tom Izzo or Tubby Smith or Nolan Richardson or Lute Olson, college basketball coaches whose sideline passions are broadly interpreted as a willingness to fight for their teams and motivate players.
That Spurrier thinks like a basketball coach should come as no surprise to those who know him well. He greatly admires John Wooden, even carries the UCLA legend’s sayings around in his wallet on a dogeared piece of paper that is pulled out regularly for speaking engagements. He meets, when asked, with Florida basketball recruits when Billy Donovan brings them to Gainesville. He counts Tennessee women’s coach Pat Summitt, inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in October, as a friend.
For that matter, Spurrier was more dominant in his early teenage years as a high-scoring basketball player than he was as a quarterback.
“I’m more like a basketball coach, you’re right,” Spurrier said. “At coaches’ meetings I probably try to spend more time with the basketball coaches than the football coaches. People expect a head coach in basketball to really coach his team. He’s in the forefront. That’s kind of the way I was as an assistant coach, coaching the offense at Georgia Tech and at Duke, and that’s the way I always figured I wanted to do it if I ever became a head coach.”
Spurrier delegates the defensive coaching to others, Jon Hoke in the case of Tuesday’s Sugar Bowl meeting with Miami. The offense is his personal concern, right up until the play clock leaves mere seconds in which to call for the snap. Florida’s quarterbacks are trained to unravel on their own what a defense is showing them at the line of scrimmage, and then to glance over to the sidelines to make certain the coach isn’t seeing something else.
“I’ve probably called plays 99 percent of the time in our 11 years here,” Spurrier said. “We’ll yell out audibles, too, when it’s not too loud.”
Losing bruises the ego
It was too loud at Tallahassee on Nov. 18. The Seminoles won 30-7 that night, earning their third straight victory over the Gators and a spot in the BCS championship game opposite Oklahoma. For those who feel the need to see Spurrier humbled, know that the coach’s ego suffers a serious bruise after poor efforts like that one and that no voice scolds him like his own.
“That FSU game, I called a lousy game,” he said. “We ran right into them when we were running and there were a lot of passes where we were throwing into the wrong defense. It was so loud there’s not much checking off. We didn’t coach good, the players didn’t play good and the officials didn’t have a good game, either.”
There it is, right at the end, a reference to officiating that fulfills Spurrier’s penchant for including something potentially aggravating in almost every significant statement about the major rivals on Florida’s annual schedule, FSU, Tennessee, Georgia and the like. That won’t change, and neither will the way his enemies read him. Spurrier’s latest dig, explored in depth before a receptive crowd during an SEC Championship Game news conference, is that the Gators play in the nation’s top conference and therefore have a significantly tougher trip to the national championship game than the Seminoles or Hurricanes. It is a viewpoint he hasn’t softened since, no matter who’s asking or who disagrees with the answer.
“The problem in the state of Florida is that FSU breezes through the ACC and you’ve got Miami in the Big East,” Spurrier said. “There are some good teams in those conferences but if you look at SEC history, we didn’t do well prior to 1990.
“We ask a lot of our players at Florida. We had an emotional game the week before the FSU game against South Carolina. If we don’t beat South Carolina, we don’t play for the SEC championship. The last three years we’ve gotten beat by FSU and we need to beat them more often. Having that SEC Championship Game at the end, though, that makes it just a little tougher than some other teams.”
How then does Spurrier measure the frustration of being in the top 10 nationally but a potential No. 3, if Miami wins the Sugar Bowl, in his own state?
“We can’t worry about that,” he said. “They don’t play the teams we play and we don’t play the teams they play. We don’t play any common opponents. It’s ridiculous, three teams in the state of Florida and three different schedules. How many times has FSU won in Knoxville? They never have. So you see, we’ve done some things they don’t. Fans will say that’s making excuses but that’s OK. That’s the way it is.”
Excelling early
Fascinating, but then so is the way it was.
Spurrier, the son of a Presbyterian minister, was born in Miami Beach in 1945 while his father, J. Graham Spurrier, was serving a church there. The family moved around through several small towns, as ministers often do, until a more permanent assignment, when Steve was
12, brought them to Johnson City, Tenn. There he first excelled as an athlete, winning all-state honors in football, basketball and baseball at Science Hill High School. The only time he ever was benched wasn’t for poor play but for overplaying.
“In ninth-grade basketball, my coach was the football line coach,” he said. “I could dribble behind my back, which not everybody did, and I would shoot a fancy hook shot up to the goal every now and then. He thought I was too much of a showboat. That’s the word he used. I was a little upset about getting taken out of the game but after a while he sent me back in. I think we won that little old tournament, too.”
Spurrier loved the SEC from his earliest memories, including the two or three times each season he and his father and his older brother Graham made the 100-mile drive to Knoxville to watch the Volunteers play. Tennessee was running a single-wing offense at the time of his high school graduation, however, and that was no reasonable option for a skinny quarterback who loved to throw. Lived to throw, actually.
“I wanted to stay in the South,” Spurrier said. “I almost went to Ole Miss. They were one of the best passing teams in the ‘60s and they were usually fighting for the conference championship with Alabama. Somebody once told me, though, that you ought to go to school in the state where you’d like to live. Well, I didn’t want to live in Mississippi and I figured there must be a reason why everybody up North is saving their money so they can retire in Florida.”
Spurrier signed with coach Ray Graves and the Gators but, like all NCAA freshmen, was ineligible to play that first season. So it happened, in 1964, that Spurrier experienced as a sophomore the same carousel he has visited on Jesse Palmer and Rex Grossman and so many other Gators quarterbacks in the 1990s. Graves rotated Spurrier and senior Tom Shannon in and out of the huddle, though never strictly on an alternate series basis, or even alternate plays.
“Coach Graves started me the fourth or fifth game of the season,” Spurrier said. “Later I told him, ‘If you want to start him and bring me in, that’s fine.’ So that’s what we did. He started the senior and then I played probably two-thirds of the game. He was a senior, he’d been the starter and it seemed like everybody was more happy.
“The game has changed so much since then as far as X’s and O’s. As a coach, you try to get your best players out there. You make it a competition for playing time. Obviously, you set yourself up for criticism. If you play two guys and you lose, the sportswriters are saying you should have played the other guy. If you play one guy and lose, though, everybody seems to be all right with that.”
Will he press into NFL?
Grossman and Brock Berlin, sophomores by eligibility in 2001, probably will be Spurrier’s next flip-flop pair. Understanding all that he demands of them, the coach says a quarterback needs to successfully run about 75-80 percent of the plays he calls for the Gators to have a chance. Wuerffel, like Spurrier a Heisman Trophy winner, began his Florida career below that standard but finished it above.
“Rex and Brock have got a chance to play the way Danny did,” Spurrier said. “I told them the same thing I tell every quarterback we recruit. You’ll have the opportunity to beat out the players that are here, but after you get to Florida and you’re the starter, I’m telling new recruits they’ll be able to earn some of your starting time, too.”
Pressing, always pressing, that’s the Spurrier way, but will he ever press on to coach in the NFL? Not likely. In the short term, Florida has a young team returning next year and should be among the favorites to win the national title, particularly with FSU and Tennessee scheduled to play in Gainesville. In the long term, Spurrier loves the down time afforded a college coach, time to play golf, to soak up sun at his new home on the Intracoastal Waterway at Crescent Beach, to enjoy the company of his family — Jerri, Steve’s wife of 34 years, their four children and four grandsons.
“I think everybody realizes the odds are extremely slim I would leave on my own,” said Spurrier, who came closest to making the jump in January 1996 when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers wanted him. “At the professional level, it seems to me, they’re all trying to outwork each other. It seems like it’s that way 11 months a year. If you can make the same amount of money being a head coach in college, it would be a foolish move to do it in the NFL. The lifestyle here is a lot better.”
The Bucs’ 1996 offer was $2 million annually. Spurrier’s recent Florida contract extension guarantees him $2.1 million per year through 2006. Also, had he left before the 1996 season, there would have been no national championship experience with the Gators, no 52-20 Sugar Bowl trouncing of the Seminoles.
“When we were coaching the Bandits in Tampa in 1984, I used to go to
FSU and talk to their coaches,” Spurrier said. “They’d let us come through the football offices and look around. Jim Gladden, an assistant coach who has been there more than 25 years, told me, ‘You know, for a former Gator, you’re not too bad.’ I’d talk to Bobby every now and then. He’s always looking for a ballplay. We didn’t have any animosity then.”
And what about their relationship now?
“Oh, it’s probably about as good as can be expected,” he said.
So concludes this column about Steve Spurrier. Something told me you’d make it all the way to the end.
‘I’m in the forefront out there, not sitting off to the side with my headsets on, looking like I’m listening. I’m not afraid to put my name on the line every play that’s called.’ — Steve Spurrier