That’s definitely what he’s gonna do but if he wanted to actually do the smart thing, he’d come back for a third year
I can’t imagine him getting a spot on a European squad. He can’t handle the ball, can’t shoot free throws, can’t shoot 3s, can’t rebound, and can’t force turnovers without cheap fouls. Did I miss anything?
plant i work at as a contractor is furloughing their employees for a week in february. our contract says they have to pay us but to get paid we would have to use vacation i don't want to use a week vacation in the middle of february. but we have the option of working at a different site for a week. that site happens to be columbia i can't wait to return to monday night pavs and pint night and really live it up again
Hit me up when you come to town. I ain't going to Pavs, but I was at Breakers til 2 last night (band was playing)
From a Post & Courier article I read this am: "USC is No. 348 (out of 350 teams) in personal fouls per game with 22.5."
Women beating Ole Miss 32-2 at halftime Ole Miss didn’t score until they finally made a layup with a minute left in the half. Was 29-0 until then.
Spoiler COLUMBIA, S.C. — Steve Spurrier has compiled, since his first job at Duke in 1980, lists of ideas and philosophies that make sense to him. Until the end of his coaching career, he regularly consulted a typed list of more than 30 pointers Blue Devils head coach Red Wilson handed out to that 1980 Blue Devils coaching staff (Spurrier was offensive coordinator). Spurrier since has kept similarly typed notes from the suggestions of people as varied as former UCLA head basketball coach John Wooden and ancient Hunnic king Atilla the Hun on any subject he believes corresponds with winning. He was thinking a lot, particularly, about Atilla in 2015 when he walked away from South Carolina’s football team midway through the season. “Let me talk about the word quit,” Spurrier said midway through a two-hour conversation. Spurrier coached the Gamecocks for 10 1/2 seasons. Those years included the best stretch in the school’s football history, but the end was sour enough that both he and some fans still have a bitter taste in their mouths. The 74-year-old Spurrier is a little grayer than he was when he left the team, but still has the edgy energy that has marked his coaching career. And he’s animated. Ready to go. “Everybody wants to say, ‘Never quit,’” he said. “Quitting sometimes is good. You quit drinking too much, quit smoking, quit doing drugs, quit arguing and fighting with your spouse or friends, quit eating french fries every meal. There are a lot of things where quitting is the best. “In my situation, I thought it was like that. In ‘Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun,’ it says, ‘When defeat is inevitable and there’s no way you can win, it’s better to retreat and come back and fight another day.’ Quitting to me has always meant in the middle of a game you have a chance to win and your players or coaches quit on it. That’s quitting. I felt like I was defeated. I needed to retreat, to get out, and maybe somebody (else) could provide a spark that I could not provide for that team. Maybe it was just such that nobody could have helped it much.” Even though all that is far in the rearview mirror now, it remains important to him to explain himself, important enough that he was willing to go over it all again in minute detail and reveal, in some cases for the first time, his emotions and the incidents that led to his decision. That’s why he agreed to meet a reporter at the office of a friend, just a mile down Bluff Road from Williams-Brice Stadium, to talk about all of it again. “I looked into the mirror in that 2015 season and said, ‘You’ve become a sorry ball coach,’” Spurrier said wistfully. That’s a remarkable statement from a man who won 228 games and lost 89 in his collegiate career, but it’s a telling one. This is a story about things that might seem small but loomed large for Spurrier, and ultimately ended one of the most successful careers in college football history. It started in 2014. From 2010-13, the Gamecocks won 40 games and an SEC East title. It was the most wins in a four-year period in school history, and it was the high-water mark of South Carolina football. The Gamecocks finished the 2013 season ranked No. 4. “That arguably was the greatest year in school history,” Spurrier said. “I was just hoping for a top-10 finish, but I remember (former football operations director) Jamie Speronis calling and saying, ‘Coach, we’re No. 4 in the dang nation.’ I said, ‘You’re kidding.’ So we were all feeling really good about ourselves, and I went to (athletic director Ray) Tanner and said, ‘How do you feel about giving all the coaches two-year contracts?’ And he said, ‘OK, we’ll do that.’ One of our coaches even wanted a three-year (contract). … Mistakenly, we did that. It was a mistake.” Spurrier believes the decision to give the coaching staff more security led to complacency among some coaches, particularly on the defensive side, as it was coordinator Lorenzo Ward who received the three-year contract. The Gamecocks finished last in the SEC and 104th in the nation in yards per play allowed (6.22) in 2014, and gave up a two-touchdown lead in the second half three times — in a span of four games — during that season. The final time it happened, in a 45-42 overtime loss to Tennessee on Nov. 1, Spurrier walked out of the postgame news conference without taking questions. It was the start of a bad week. “I tell people I had sort of the ‘Urban Meyer disease.’ You know how when Urban has a loss, it just hits him? Well, it hit me,” Spurrier said. “I forgot the code to my dressing room door at the stadium.” He had to ask equipment manager Chris Matlock how to access the dressing room. “Ten years, the same code, and all of a sudden … Phone numbers, I forgot them,” he said. “I had never quite had anything like that.” That loss dropped South Carolina to 4-5 on the season, and it drove Spurrier to a classic moment in any good protagonist’s story: the bargain with God. The son of a Presbyterian minister, Spurrier always has been serious, though not publicly vocal, about his faith. “I sort of said, ‘You know, I’m a person of faith, a believer, and I know God has really smiled on me,’” Spurrier said. “I prayed, ‘Lord, if I get a chance to get out of this with a winning season, I’ll resign, I’ll hang it up. I’ve had my share of good fortune and that’ll be it.’” God came through on his end of the deal. South Carolina beat Florida 23-20 on Nov. 15 in what Spurrier called “a miracle win.” “How often do you block a field goal and a punt in the last four minutes of a game?” he asked. (Current South Carolina head coach Will Muschamp has often wondered the same thing. Muschamp was the Gators’ head coach in that game. He was fired the following day.) The Gamecocks beat South Alabama the following week and then lost to Clemson before closing out the season by beating Miami 24-21 in the Independence Bowl to finish 7-6. “So, we’re 7-6, we’ve got a winning season. I got even with Miami. I had been 0-1 against Miami. People ask, ‘Do coaches keep up with that?’ Yeah, I keep up with that,” Spurrier said. The high of 2013 would fall to a disappointing low in 2014. (Gerry Melendez / The State / Tribune News Service via Getty Images) Spurrier called Tanner that week and said, “I think it’s time. Let’s call the press conference.” But Tanner urged Spurrier to reconsider, which gave other external forces time to go to work on him. “Of course, (wife Jerri Spurrier) didn’t want that,” Steve said. “She loved living here. She loved hugging the players. She loved everything about it. Of course, I had two sons on the staff (assistant coach Steve Spurrier Jr. and analyst Scottie Spurrier). They didn’t want to go for that. Then (Florida radio host and longtime friend) Buddy Martin, he called up and he says, ‘Steve, do you realize you have a chance to do something that has never been done in the history of college football, win 100 games at two schools?’ He said, ‘You’ve got 84, all you need is 16.’” Spurrier had always thrived on firsts. He relished every time he did something that had never been done before, which he did a lot. He won the first national football title at Florida, and he left a laundry list of firsts at South Carolina, where he is the all-time winningest coach with an 86-49 record. The possibility of doing something for the first time in the history of the game? Well, that was too much for Spurrier to pass up. “I sort of got greedy a little bit,” he said. “I said, ‘That’d be neat. I’m not in that bad of shape, am I?’ One thing led to another, and all the coaches had at least another year left on their deals. And I thought we had a decent team coming back. I really did. We thought we could scrap out eight wins or something like that.” So Spurrier returned for the 2015 season. The Lord let Spurrier know quickly that it was the wrong decision. First, three players suffered significant injuries during preseason practice. None of them were starters. The injuries didn’t hurt the Gamecocks on the field, but they upset Spurrier’s idea of how things should be done. For most coaches, practice injuries are considered a price of doing business. For Spurrier, they always were galling. “Here I am, the head coach, and I told parents, ‘We’re going to look after your sons. We are not going to get hurt in practice. We’re going to protect each other. We know the difference between teammates and opponents,’” he said. “And all of a sudden we’re getting guys hurt in practice, and there’s not a lot of remorse being shown by the players that caused the injuries.” He began to worry then that he was losing the attention of his team. He would have more reason to worry soon. “There were some things that happened that let me know for sure that I was not as respected as I normally was as the head coach,” he said. “I had one player call me bro.” Spurrier declined to name the player, but it was a quarterback on the team. “I was asking why he did something. It was after a game,” Spurrier recalled. “He actually tried to throw a fade and threw it about 10 yards out of bounds. He didn’t even look at the other side of the field and the play was wide open. I asked him, ‘Did you get the signal from the sideline?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Why didn’t you go to the 92 Hugo side? That was the play.’ He said, ‘I thought I could hit whatchacallit on the fade.’ I said, ‘You acted like you didn’t get the signal,’ and he said, ‘I ain’t stupid, bro.’ Of course, I said, ‘I didn’t say you were, bro.’ I started thinking, ‘I used to be called coach and now I’m being called bro.’” Just the memory of it still makes him shake his head a little. And then came what Spurrier called “the final nail.” Dismayed by a drastic dropoff in attendance at the team’s weekly chapel service, Spurrier addressed it in a team meeting during the season. “We (usually) had about the whole team there basically. We had our team chaplain Adrian Despres there, and he gave a nice message and that’s just what we did. We did it for 10 years like that. We did it no problem. And all of a sudden that 11th year nobody wanted to come,” Spurrier said. “Instead of 60, there were eight or 10. After about the fourth week, Adrian said, ‘Coach, have I done something wrong here?’ I said, ‘You haven’t, and I’m going to say something to the team about it.’ It’s always voluntary and it’ll always be voluntary but we encouraged people to come. So I talked to the team. I said I want to encourage all of you, for 10 years now almost all of us have come to chapel service, and I want to encourage you to come. I’ll be there. My wife will be there. We need to hear his message, 20, 25 minutes a week, I don’t think that’s too much, but it’s up to you. It’ll never be compulsory, but I’d like to encourage you. You know how many came the next week? Eight to 10. Same guys just about. I said, ‘Well, these guys don’t listen to me.’ And really they didn’t.” More than four years later these might seem like small issues. For Spurrier, they felt like fatal flaws. His players weren’t practicing the way he wanted them to. They weren’t talking to him the way he expected them to. They increasingly seemed immune to his influence. “After the LSU game, we were 2-4, I said, ‘I’m finished. These guys don’t listen to me.’ I had ceased to be heard,” he said. This time, Tanner tried to get Spurrier to at least delay his decision until the end of the year, Spurrier said. He couldn’t. “You can’t fake enthusiasm,” Spurrier said. “I said, ‘I can’t go to practice and pretend I’m fired up to help this team win a game. I don’t have anything left to coach this team.’” He also didn’t relish the thought of more losses and all the foes who had waited so long to get their crack at him savoring his decline. “I don’t mind telling you: I hated those camera guys. When the game’s over and I got my butt kicked and they all want to get right in my face with that camera? Like, ‘Here’s Spurrier after we beat them.’ But still, it wasn’t that so much. I had done a poor job with the coaching and the team, a lot of mistakes. I want the fans to know I made a bunch of mistakes that year, and the only way for me to correct them was for me to leave. I couldn’t clean house and start over at age 70.” With that, the winningest coach of all time at Florida and South Carolina, the 1966 Heisman Trophy winner, the man credited with revolutionizing the run-heavy culture of the SEC in the 1990s, and a Hall of Famer as a player and a coach was done with college football. “I want people to know that I didn’t quit or resign or whatever you want to call it because we were losing, it was because I had lost command of the team somehow or another so I blame myself for it,” Spurrier said. “It may have had to do with my age. I probably shouldn’t have said (in 2014) I’ve got two or three more years, shouldn’t have done that. The guys sensed, ‘He’s not going to be here much longer. We don’t have to listen to him.’ That might have been part of the reason.” When Spurrier told the team of his decision to leave during a team meeting on Monday, Oct. 12, 2015, only one player, offensive lineman Brandon Shell, tried to talk him out of it. “It was over for me mentally to coach that team and they were OK with it,” Spurrier said. “Brandon Shell came by and said, ‘Coach, you’ve still got plenty left.’ The rest just went on. I knew I’d made the right choice. I was completely at peace. It was the right thing to do. I know a lot of the fans didn’t think it was the right thing to do, but they didn’t quite realize the stuff that happened that was so different from years past.” Spurrier wishes he’d never given his assistant multiyear contracts. He wishes he had let Jon Hoke make significant changes to the defensive coaching staff in 2015 when Hoke arrived to co-coordinate the defense with Ward. When Spurrier hired Bob Stoops as Florida’s defensive coordinator in 1996, he hadn’t let Stoops bring anyone else with him, and that worked out well enough that the Gators won the national title that season. It did not work in Columbia, though. “Jon wanted to bring a couple of defensive coaches with him and I thought, ‘Well, we have to pay these guys anyway, and they’re probably not going to get another job,” Spurrier said. “That was bad on my part.” He knows there were recruiting mistakes at the end, too, although he defends his son Steve Jr., who was the recruiting coordinator from 2011-2015. “Some people think the recruiting coordinator has anything to do with recruiting. He doesn’t. The head coach is in charge of recruiting,” Spurrier said. “Steve Jr. was responsible for recruiting wide receivers and his area of the state and his area of the country. If you see the wide receivers who came through here, he did an excellent job, but he wasn’t in charge of D-linemen. If we didn’t sign DBs, it was the position coach and head coach’s fault. People think the recruiting coordinator is the same as the defensive coordinator, but he’s not. That’s not true at all. When you look at all the receivers he coached here, Steve did an excellent job for 10 years. I take the blame for how it went down. The recruiting did slip a little bit, no question.” There’s one recruiting miss that particularly sticks with Spurrier. It was the summer of 2015, and quarterback Jake Fromm from Warner Robins, Ga., was on South Carolina’s campus. “He said, ‘Coach, how long are you going to be here? Can you guarantee you will be here five years from now?’” Spurrier said. “I said, ‘Jake. I can’t guarantee it, I plan on it, though. You can always say, ‘I plan on it,’ without saying a falsehood.” Under different conditions, Fromm might have been a Gamecock instead of going to Georgia, where he won an SEC title and played for a national championship. “We had a good shot at him, but he’s a Georgia kid, so I don’t know,” Spurrier said. The way his South Carolina career ended “gnawed” at him for years, he said. The Alliance of American Football helped. The upstart league didn’t even last a season, but it was a lifeline for Spurrier. His Orlando Apollos finished 7-1 and were named the league’s champions by FanDuel (which had to determine a champion to pay off wagers). Steve Spurrier has been vocal about how much he enjoys his time as Gators ambassador. (Kim Klement / USA Today) “I was blessed to go out a winner,” he said. “I felt like I got some redemption for doing a sorry job here. I did a sorry job, and I was determined I wasn’t going to do a sorry job again. I am so thankful and appreciative. I could look in the mirror and say, ‘You turned out to be a pretty good ball coach.’ My daughter Amy said, ‘I think God created the Alliance so my dad would have a chance to go out a winner,’ and that might be a good way to look at it.” Spurrier will not return to collegiate coaching, he said. He would answer the phone if an XFL team called and he would consider coaching offense if his son Scottie ever became a head high school coach in the Orlando area, he said. Otherwise, he’s out of the game except for his role as a consultant at his alma mater. “If I never coach again, I’m OK,” he said. “But at the same time I’m not retired. I hate that word, retired. That’s a guy that stays home all day and does nothing. I’ve got a little bit of a job, a wonderful job at the University of Florida.” Spurrier is proud that South Carolina had a winning record against Clemson, Georgia, Florida and Tennessee during his tenure (24-19), and he’s proud that an athletic department that had only one $1 million donor before he arrived now has a handful of big-money boosters, and that he contributed more than $1 million to the school himself in his time there, he said. “A lot of fans and donors who could give big money to South Carolina saw the light at the end of the tunnel,” he said. “Hey, maybe we can win and win big. We can be relevant in football. We don’t have to look up to Florida and Georgia and Tennessee and all those guys anymore. I think that really helped spur the boosters. My one disappointment is we didn’t sneak in there and win the SEC. It was doable, but we just didn’t get it done.” “I’ve been blessed far beyond my wildest expectations of anything,” Spurrier said. “A kid from Athens, Newport and Johnson City, Tenn., whose dad was a small church minister. I was born with eye and hand coordination. I could shoot and throw and do some things some of the other kids couldn’t do. … I played ball all the time but so did all the other kids. You’re born with certain talents, and I was blessed with that.” As for his coaching, that was all learned on the job, he said. But he did that well enough to win more SEC football games than any coach other than Bear Bryant. “I’ve always said I’d like to be considered one of the best,” he said.
“There were some things that happened that let me know for sure that I was not as respected as I normally was as the head coach,” he said. “I had one player call me bro.” Spurrier declined to name the player, but it was a quarterback on the team. “I was asking why he did something. It was after a game,” Spurrier recalled. “He actually tried to throw a fade and threw it about 10 yards out of bounds. He didn’t even look at the other side of the field and the play was wide open. I asked him, ‘Did you get the signal from the sideline?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Why didn’t you go to the 92 Hugo side? That was the play.’ He said, ‘I thought I could hit whatchacallit on the fade.’ I said, ‘You acted like you didn’t get the signal,’ and he said, ‘I ain’t stupid, bro.’ Of course, I said, ‘I didn’t say you were, bro.’ I started thinking, ‘I used to be called coach and now I’m being called bro.’” Connor Mitch?
“I looked into the mirror in that 2015 season and said, ‘You’ve become a sorry ball coach,’” Spurrier said wistfully.
Kinda crazy thinking about how McIlwain and Bentley were in a QB battle here four years ago and now both play for PAC schools
This Burch situation is so bizarre. Dude has publicly committed then publicly affirmed that commitment six weeks later but still won’t sign. Is this an Alex Collins situation?
Seems from the outside like his mama basically is going to force the kid at gunpoint to sign with Muschamp. Pretty obvious he would rather go somewhere else.
He’s put it out on social media that he is “officially a gamecock” if he didn’t want to come here I can’t imagine he’d do that. This feels like mom. But I don’t know.
He was an Arkansas running back from Florida who’s mom refused to sign the LOI to Arky because she wanted him to go to Miami or UF so she stole it so it couldn’t be faxed. I think the dad got involved and signed and faxed it a couple days later.
Yeah i guess there are rumors now that it’s mama who wants him at LSU. Also talk that they basically committed to Clemson and UGA at various points this year, too.
Before today I would have agreed with you, but it sort of seems the other way around. either way it’s kinda sad if his mom is that domineering. Hope the kid gets to go where he wants whether it’s us or someone else.
He was barely top 100 in the composite, mostly because ESPN had him ranked stupid high Highest rated fullback of all time