Spur in Their Saddles : Spurrier, the Coach They Love to Hate, Has Florida Playing for Its First National Title

In his first stint as a head coach, with the U.S. Football League’s Tampa Bay Bandits, Steve Spurrier ordered an on-side kick on the opening kickoff against the Memphis Showboats.

The Bandits recovered and scored.

Spurrier then ordered another on-side kick. The Bandits recovered and scored again.

“Embarrassment is part of the game to him,” Memphis Coach Pepper Rodgers remarked afterward.

Spurrier won his 1990 debut at the University of Florida, 50-7, and wasn’t crazy about the 7.

He likes telling the joke about the fire at the Auburn dormitory that destroyed 20 books, the tragedy being 15 of them hadn’t been colored yet.

When some Florida State players got caught with their feet in the NCAA cookie jar for taking shoes in a now-infamous shopping spree, Spurrier started calling FSU “Free Shoes University.”

His game-day attire--V-cut vest sweater and white visor--might be described as early Fred Couples. As the game unfolds, the visor can expect to end up filthy and flogged.

Spurrier is 50, but looks 35. The golf get-up? When he’s not ringing up 50-point victories, he’s a scratch player.

When Spurrier gets peeved, his face turns sourpuss, the lower lip protruding like a 2-year-old who pushes away his oatmeal.

When a reporter gave Auburn’s Terry Bowden the coaching edge over Spurrier in a pregame graphic, Spurrier called the publisher to complain.

Since taking over at Florida, Spurrier’s Gators have gone 61-12-1 and won four Southeastern Conference titles, the last three in succession, a feat matched only by Alabama’s Bear Bryant.

Tuesday, in the Fiesta Bowl, the 12-0 Gators seek the school’s first national championship.

So, what’s not to like about Steve Spurrier?

Until Spurrier, Florida football had captured no official SEC titles (a 1984 crown was vacated for NCAA violations).

Spurrier’s Fun ‘N Gun offense, (he prefers “Air Ball”) has sent SEC coaches screaming into the night to scour the back woods for linebackers capable of defending Florida’s space-age speed.

“I can’t wait until it gets back to the old tight end and three-back,” an SEC defensive coordinator mutters. “It might, but I won’t live that long.”

Spurrier goes through quarterbacks like socks. There have been 14 since his arrival.

This relates to a theory Spurrier shares with Charles Darwin.

Terry Dean got blown out after tossing four interceptions against Auburn in 1994. He emerged from a dress-down meeting with Spurrier to announce that “my knees were shaking.”

Spurrier drives quarterbacks like a mule team.

“He treats them like pros,” one Florida writer says. “If he’d have had a waiver wire, Terry Dean would have been put on waivers.”

If you live to tell about it, though, you can become Danny Wuerffel, the clean-cut, pearl-polished quarterback who set an NCAA record for efficiency at 178.4.

“I would rather play for a coach who demands perfection than one who accepts mediocrity,” Wuerffel says.

If Spurrier is rougher on quarterbacks than the rest of the squad, he hasn’t noticed.

“If the right guard misses a block a lot of times, I’ll yell at him,” Spurrier says playfully. “If you’re going to yell at one, yell at them all. Keep them all happy.”

Every time an NFL job opens up, Spurrier’s name jumps to the top of the list.

Though flattered, it kills him to know SEC coaches use it against him in recruiting.

Just to be fair (wink), Spurrier this week endorsed Tennessee’s Phil Fulmer for the NFL vacancy in Tampa Bay.

So, what’s not to like about Spurrier?

He is a former Heisman Trophy winner (1966), Sugar Bowl most valuable player, first-round draft pick, 10-year NFL backup, and quite probably the best college football coach in America.

Naturally, because he has not glad-handed or apologized for any of this, there is a current of scorn that flows throughout the SEC.

“No question, there is some resentment out there,” says Norm Carlson, Florida assistant athletic director and longtime Spurrier friend. “When you’re beating everybody’s butts, by large margins, there’s going to be resentment.”

Maybe it’s human nature that some people just can’t stand someone else’s success, especially when that someone seems to bask in it.

“A lot of people don’t like what he does,” another SEC assistant coach confides. “But if I don’t like it, my job is to stop it. I don’t like people putting up 73 points. But if you don’t like it, do something about it.”

Some see Spurrier as the anti-coach, an air-it-out arrogant. Head coaches don’t go on record ripping him, perhaps because they know Spurrier might return the rip job 10-fold next season between the hash marks.

Spurrier doesn’t buy the notion that his success has bred contempt.

“I’ve got a lot of friends in the coaching world,” he says. “I like everybody. I don’t know any coach out there I don’t like, to tell you the truth, and I think they all like me. I don’t know, you all have to go take your individual polls.”

A random sampling of SEC assistants, in fact, suggests the house is divided against Spurrier.

“There’s half that do like him and half that don’t,” one SEC defensive coordinator says. “Some coaches think he runs up the score and tries to put his ego out there.”

A few of the scores during Spurrier’s six-year reign of terror: 73-7, 70-21, 61-14, 58-3, 59-21. Another SEC coach, however, says, “I’d like to have my son play for him.”

Carlson, Florida’s sports information director when Spurrier won his Heisman, says Spurrier gets in trouble sometimes because he’s too blunt.

“Sometimes that creates ill feelings,” Carlson says. “Steve speaks his mind. He doesn’t hide behind cliches.”

Arkansas’ Danny Ford, maybe Spurrier’s best friend among SEC coaches, has another word for the criticism.

“I think it’s jealousy,” Ford says.

Florida State Coach Bobby Bowden says he likes Spurrier.

Free Shoes University?

“The jokes he told when the Foot Locker thing came open, those were humorous to me,” Bowden says. “I don’t get upset over things like that. If he’s said I’d stepped out on my wife, I’d get upset.”

It has been suggested that the coaches who don’t like him conspire against him.

It was curious last month when Wuerffel, who finished third in the Heisman Trophy balloting, was named second-team All-SEC by the coaches, who voted Tennessee sophomore Peyton Manning first.

“A vote against Spurrier, more than anything,” a Florida-based writer says.

Another SEC assistant coach agrees: “You know, if someone rubs my nose in it. . . . There are factions out there that take anger out in other ways. It’s very real.”

Chris Doering, Florida’s star wide receiver and Wuerffel’s best friend, does not discount the conspiracy theories.

“I think it was because they disliked the coach, and they took it out on his quarterback,” Doering says. “And that’s not fair. Danny was obviously the best quarterback in the conference.”

Spurrier, though, didn’t see it as a snub and suggested some coaches turned in their ballots before Wuerffel closed the season with two sensational games, against Florida State and Arkansas.

This week, to right the wrong, the same coaches named Wuerffel SEC Player of the Year and Spurrier as Coach of the Year.

“Really, I get along with about 90%, or more [of the coaches],” Spurrier says. “One or two guys say something, here or there, and everyone starts talking about it some, and then it dies down.”

No matter what anyone thinks of him personally, no one can deny Spurrier his due.

“It doesn’t matter whether you like Steve or not,” one coordinator says. “It doesn’t take away the fact he’s a good football coach. You can throw all that other stuff out. I respect what he does as a coach.”

The proof is in the poundings.

Spurrier has re-invented the SEC with his attack offense. Since landing in Gainesville in 1990, he has led Florida to its first 10-, 11-, and 12-victory seasons.

This year’s team averaged an SEC-record 534.4 yards in per-game offense, of which 360.8 were passing yards. The Gators averaged 44.5 points per game, also an SEC record.

The SEC, accustomed to grind-it-out football, has had to adjust rapidly.

“If you can’t spread it around and sling it around, you’re in trouble” LSU defensive coordinator Carl Reese says. “It all started when he came in the league. First it was Florida, then Tennessee, they’re all starting to look alike. That’s what we’re dealing with. Spreading zones and the fields.

“You have to change. When we go out [recruiting], we’re looking for guys who can play man coverage; linebackers have to be guys who can cover man and blitz. The old way doesn’t get it done anymore.”

Spurrier came by his philosophy honestly. Growing up in Johnson City, Tenn., the son of a preacher, he once scored 40 of his team’s 44 points in a basketball game.

When he was Gator quarterback, Spurrier used to draw up plays in the dirt.

When he scored his first college head coaching job at Duke in 1987, Spurrier couldn’t wait to unleash what he kindly likes to call “ball plays.”

While this year’s Florida defense may well push the Gators over the top, there’s no mystery which side of the ball Spurrier prefers.

“When he was at Duke, he used to let you score so he could get the ball back,” Ford says.

But what of the axiom that defense wins championships?

“They used to say that,” Spurrier says. “They don’t say that as much down South as they used to. There’s all kind of ways to win championships.”

Spurrier’s way is to spread a defense horizontally with five-receiver sets, then stretch it vertically. The quarterback is an extension of Spurrier, often looking to the coach for instructions even while approaching the line of scrimmage.

“It’s like playing basketball on grass,” one opposing SEC defensive coordinator says of Florida’s offense.

One opposing coach says the best way to learn how to defend the Gators is to attend a basketball clinic on full-court traps and the run press.

The offense is so good sometimes it’s scary.

“It’s amazing how many formations are possible,” Spurrier says.

Trailing Tennessee by 16 points this season, Florida scored 48 unanswered points in a 62-37 rout.

“Everything he was calling was working,” Doering says of the game. “We were scoring every time we touched the ball.”

So what if Spurrier’s act sticks in a few craws?

“People that describe him as confident and cocky and obnoxious are the teams that we beat routinely,” Doering says.

An SEC coach sums it up this way:

“When you play Florida, you have to bring the whole tool box, you can’t just bring a screwdriver.”