Wait… you’re telling me that with everything on the line for his supposedly beloved South Carolina tomorrow, Steve Spurrier would rather be at a game where the Gators are trying to beat Kentucky for the umpteenth time in a row?
Priorities, priorities…
Filed under The Evil Genius
Between this and this…
… it appears Dos Equis is going all in on using former college football coaches to hawk its wares. Bold strategy, Cotton.
This would have made for some must-see football.
When Orlando’s team begins in the inaugural season of the Alliance of American Football next February, we know Steve Spurrier will be on the sideline.
We now know Tim Tebow won’t be on the field.
In an appearance on The Paul Finebaum Show on Friday, Spurrier said he texted Tebow to gauge his interest about a return to football, according to Sports Illustrated. Tebow, an outfielder-designated hitter with the New York Mets’ Class AA affiliate in the Eastern League, declined.
“He said, ‘Coach, I’m gonna keep swinging the bat and see what happens,’” Spurrier said. “I told him we’d have a No. 15 down in Orlando waiting for him.”
That’s a shame. I would love to watch a montage of Spurrier throwing a visor and then yanking the GPOOE™ from a game moments afterwards. Ah, well.
Filed under The Evil Genius, Tim Tebow: Rock Star
Steve Spurrier will forever have something gnawing at his soul.
Spurrier traces his disdain for the Dawgs to his own playing career.
The Dawgs beat his Florida Gators in 1966, the year Spurrier won the Heisman.
They beat us my senior year in college. They knocked us out; Florida had a chance to win its first-ever SEC title. We went over to Jacksonville, and they beat the crap out of us in the second half and ended up winning, 27-10, something like that. Now they completely outplayed us, wasn’t any flukes or anything like that.
But as a coach, I thought maybe I could get even with them.
And we’ll always have this nail in the OBC’s coffin. No, it’s not a completely even swap, but it sure makes for a nice bookend to go with 1966.
A native of Cairo, Ga., Stanfill first put his name on the football map in Georgia’s 27-10 upset of previously unbeaten Florida in 1966. Then a sophomore, Stanfill led the Bulldogs’ all-out rush on UF quarterback Steve Spurrier, sacking him twice and hitting him repeatedly after many of his passes. Though Spurrier went on to win the Heisman Trophy, the memory of Georgia denying the Gators their first SEC title and overcoming a 10-3 halftime deficit still resonates as one of Stanfill’s greatest memories.
“If I wasn’t sacking [Spurrier], I was knocking him down,” said Stanfill, a 35-year resident of Albany, Ga., who retired in 2010 as an agricultural real estate broker. “He just didn’t have time to throw.”
Filed under Georgia Football, The Evil Genius
Chris Brown doesn’t post as often at Smart Football as he used to, so when he does put something up about college football, it’s a cause for celebration (for me, at least). And this piece about Steve Spurrier and his love for the deep post pass is worth reading, not just for the Xs-and-Os aspect, which Chris doles out in spades, but also because of what it says about Spurrier’s mindset as a head coach and game planner.
In 1990, Steve Spurrier took over at Florida, vowing to not only turn around the Gators but also to bring an entirely new brand of football to the Southeastern Conference, namely an aggressive, pass-first system that had its roots in the offenses Spurrier ran as an NFL quarterback, as updated and refined in his years as a head coach in the USFL and at Duke. Before the first game against Oklahoma State, Spurrier elevated a young QB named Shane Matthews from fifth on the depth chart to starter. Just before the game, Spurrier approached Matthews:
“Coach Spurrier always liked to come around and talk to guys in the locker room while they were getting ready,” Matthews said. “He finally comes to me and asks, ‘Shane, what play do you want to start with?’”
“I’d never started a college game before. A lot of people were giving him grief already for naming me the starter. So, I said: ‘Maybe a screen or a draw?’ “
And Spurrier responded: “Shoot, they didn’t hire me to come down here and run the football. We’re going to throw it.”
That first play was a 28 yard completion from Matthews to receiver Ernie Mills, who had run a post route behind a ten-to-twelve yard dig or square-in route. Florida scored a touchdown for plays later en route to a 50-7 victory. The rest was, well, history, as Spurrier’s run at Florida would be one of the most successful tenures — and influential — of any coach in football history.
Ray Goff, among others, just wasn’t ready to cope with that kind of mentality. (And, yeah, if you look closely, you’ll find video of a couple of plays where Spurrier victimized Georgia’s secondary.) That kind of mentality is what leads to a tribute like this one:
Spurrier didn’t invent The Mills Play, which would eventually come to be known simply as “Mills,” but he called it so often and so aggressively — and was so successful with it — that you’ll see the play clearly labeled as “Mills” (or “Florida” or “Gator”) in playbooks of coaches who never even coached under or played for the Ol’ Ball Coach.
Like it or not, Spurrier will go down as one of the two or three most influential coaches in SEC history.
Filed under Strategery And Mechanics, The Evil Genius
There’s not a lot of new insight in this story about McElwain’s final days in Gainesville, but there is one minor gem unearthed:
With the Gators trailing 21-0 at the half in their eventual loss to Georgia, Spurrier walked through the press box and asked a handful of reporters, “What happened to the forward pass?”
Meanwhile, Florida’s engaged in its fifth coaching search since Spurrier left.
Filed under Gators, Gators..., The Evil Genius
Somehow, this doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.
Filed under Georgia Football, The Evil Genius
