Steve Spurrier turns 81 and his best lines still hold up decades later

The Head Ball Coach turns 81 today, and he’d be the first to tell you that age is just a number.

I heard those very words from Steve Spurrier countless times in decades of covering him, being around him and listening to his stories. They never got old. Still don’t.

Rival fans abhorred him. They hated his barbs even more, especially when he was winning SEC championships, “pitching it around the ballpark,” scoring points in bunches and rubbing it in their faces. Over the years, some of those same fans have confided in me that deep down they thought some of those barbs were funny, even though they’d never admit it publicly.

Spurrier wasn’t for everyone. I get it. But he sure as hell was a lot of fun to cover back in the days when you could really get to know coaches and gain the kind of access reporters rarely get now.

Like him or not, Spurrier changed the way they played football in the SEC with his Fun ‘n’ Gun offense. As my former colleague at ESPN, Ivan Maisel, so superbly wrote about Spurrier and his impact on the SEC, “Passing was what you did because you couldn’t run. It was an admission of weakness in an old-school league. We can’t control the line of scrimmage, so we’re reduced to throwing over it.”

That all changed under Spurrier, who led Florida to four straight SEC championships from 1993-96 (the last school to win four in a row) and capped his coaching career by taking South Carolina to unprecedented success with three straight 11-win seasons and three straight top-10 finishes in the polls from 2011-13. The way it ended for Spurrier wasn’t his finest moment when he abruptly stepped down midway through the 2015 season after the Gamecocks lost four of their first six games, but he remains one of the more transcendent figures in college football history.

To celebrate Spurrier’s 81st birthday, here are some of my favorite moments with the HBC:

IN 2012, THE GEORGIA-SOUTH CAROLINA GAME moved from Week 2 to Week 6, and I asked Spurrier about playing the Bulldogs later in the season as opposed to earlier.

His response was vintage: “I don’t know. I sort of always liked playing them that second game because you could always count on them having two or three key players suspended.”

He wasn’t wrong. Georgia had gone through a rash of players being suspended for off-the-field issues. Even then-Georgia coach Mark Right thought it was (kind of) funny.

“That sounds like Steve,” Richt said.

SPURRIER AND NICK SABAN HAD A GOOD RELATIONSHIP, and there was mutual respect. I asked Spurrier about what Saban had done at Alabama following his second national title in 2011, and Spurrier went full-on Spurrier.

“He’s got a nice little gig going, a little bit like (John) Calipari. He tells guys, ‘Hey, three years from now, you’re going to be a first-round pick and go.’ If he wants to be the greatest coach or one of the greatest coaches in college football, to me, he has to go somewhere besides Alabama and win, because they’ve always won there at Alabama,” Spurrier said.

Saban shook his head and smiled when told of Spurrier’s comments.

“Somebody might want to let Steve know that LSU had eight losing seasons in 11 years before I got there,” Saban told me.

AFTER SABAN WON HIS FIFTH NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP at Alabama in 2017, he was already being hounded by retirement speculation. Spurrier gave me one of his familiar “Aahs” when I asked him how much longer he thought Saban would go.

“I told him he won’t retire until he loses three games in a season. He told me, ‘If I ever lose three games around here again, they might kill me.’ I think he was joking, but I’m not sure,” Spurrier said.

THE OFFICIAL FLORIDA RECORD BOOK may state otherwise, but Spurrier will tell you that his record at the Swamp, as both a coach and player, is 83-7.

Just to be clear, that counts a freshman game against Georgia and a flag football game (yes, a flag football game) against the Tau Epsilon Phi fraternity on campus a few years after Spurrier had been out of school. Well aware that Spurrier has a photographic memory, I asked him what he remembered about that game.

“Some fraternity boys wanted to play a bunch of us former players, so we cut off about half the field and played them. We beat them 20-19. Helluva game,” he said.

SPURRIER GREW UP IN EAST TENNESSEE as the son of a Presbyterian minister and reveled in poking at the Vols, especially with the Gators owning the rivalry in the 1990s when Tennessee had some of its most talented teams, including Peyton Manning.

The Gators had won five in a row in the series heading into the 1998 season, and Spurrier was speaking at a function in Panama City Beach, Florida, that spring. He and his longtime football operations director, Jamie Speronis, were walking up the beach, and Spurrier spotted a guy wearing an orange Tennessee shirt.

As the man approached, Spurrier piped up and said, “How them mighty Vols going to do this season?”

The fan, amazingly enough, didn’t recognize Spurrier. He held up his index finger and said defiantly, “National champs.”

Even today, Spurrier gets a kick out of that exchange.

“I’ll be damned if he wasn’t right,” Spurrier said. “They did win it that year.”

FOR THE RECORD, Spurrier has told me several times that Manning should have won the Heisman Trophy in 1997 and that he voted for Manning.

“Everybody knows he should have won it, but as we all know, the best player doesn’t always win the Heisman Trophy,” said Spurrier, who was the 1966 recipient of the award.

Spurrier said he “probably would have been a Vol” coming out of high school in Johnson City, Tennessee had the Vols not been running the single-wing offense at the time. He wanted to throw the ball, though, and went to Florida.

Spurrier said his favorite win over Tennessee didn’t come when he was at Florida, but as the offensive coordinator at Duke when the Blue Devils beat the Vols 25-24 on Sept. 4 to open the 1982 season.

“The World’s Fair was in town, and they had Reggie White, Willie Gault, just a heck of a lot of good players,” Spurrier told me. “It was my first game coaching in Neyland Stadium. I had been there for games with my dad and brother growing up, but never coached there. So I already had chill bumps walking in there, and then the announcer comes on and says, ‘It’s Football Time in Tennessee,’ and I almost had tears in my eyes. I was so jacked up. I was telling those guys on our staff, ‘It doesn’t get any better than this.’

“Just a little boy from Tennessee coaching on Rocky Top. That was thrilling.”

DURING HIS PLAYING DAYS AT FLORIDA, Spurrier got a job in the summer on the stadium maintenance staff thanks to his coach, Ray Graves.

“Back in those days, we didn’t have summer workouts, so my job was repairing the wooden bleachers in the Swamp and fixing the ones that were splintered,” Spurrier once told me. “I’d report to Coach Graves, and most of the time he didn’t have anything for me to do in the afternoon.”

So right after lunch, Spurrier would find some golf balls and head to the course.

“That was my summer, fixing the bleachers at the Swamp in the morning and golf in the afternoon. That would be a violation today, so don’t tell anybody.”

SPURRIER HAS ALWAYS BEEN HESITANT to say which player was the best he ever coached, but he’s quick to tell you who his MVP is – his wife Jerri. They met when they were students at Florida and will celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary this Sept. 14.  She was by his side when he won the Heisman Trophy in 1966 and by his side every step of the way as he carved out a Hall of Fame coaching career. Spurrier remains one of only four people to be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as both a player and coach.

“Nothing would have happened in my coaching or playing career without Jerri,” Spurrier told me.