Happy Trails to Steve Spurrier, Who Made College Football Fun

Steve Spurrier's sudden resignation from the University of South Carolina is pretty shocking, at least by the standards of abrupt departures by robustly healthy 70-year-old football coaches with 2-4 records. He might not be the greatest college football coach in history, but in whatever he did—even and maybe especially in failure—Steve Spurrier was The Best. You could round up dozens of write-ups about Spurrier's career, and still not get a complete picture of how varied and rich his life has been. In the grinding, high-pressure culture of college football, Spurrier always seemed to be enjoying himself. "I doubt if I'll never be a head coach again," Spurrier said in his farewell press conference on Tuesday. "Maybe I'll coach a high school team or something." That's easy to imagine, but it's hard to conceive of anyone better suited to a happy retirement.

Steve Spurrier was Tim Tebow two decades before Tebow was born, winning the 1966 Heisman Trophy at Florida before spending most of his pro career backing up John Brodie with the San Francisco 49ers. After leaving Duke with a winning record in the late 1980s—which would be a crowning achievement in just about any other coach's career—Spurrier returned to his alma mater, where he taught the SEC to fly by perfecting the spread offense. In 1996, he used these innovations to guide Danny Wuerffel to a Heisman of his own, and the Gators to the consensus national championship.

That said, when Spurrier failed, he did so spectacularly, like when he led the expansion Tampa Bay Buccaneers to a 0-16 mark in 1976. By the time Steve coached the Washington football team in 2002 and 2003, not even the Fun N' Gun was going to save a franchise micromanaged by Daniel Snyder.

That is just a c.v., and Spurrier's appeal and his legend has always been something bigger. The Head Ball Coach was a master of shade. He bubbled with digs both subtle and broad for rivals, their players, their boosters, and the good people at Free Shoes University; in recent years, he has taken special delight in running rhetorical circles around Dabo Swinney, the stolid head coach at rival Clemson. There is no page on Wikiquote for Steve Spurrier, which is a shame, but his quips are already part of college football lore.

Spurrier won a lot, but he did so while seeming to be the exact opposite of a workaholic; he got the job done while also enjoying his leisure time, especially golf, almost too much. Watching "Design For Winning," a pro-orange juice filmstrip from the early 1970s, it's hard not to believe Steve Spurrier was exactly what you saw on the celluloid, from shanking putts to enjoying a hearty breakfast with his wife, Jerri, right down to tossing oranges to neighborhood kids. A lot of Spurrier's work ethic comes from legendary coach Pepper Rodgers, who recruited him at Florida and then hired him as an assistant at Georgia Tech in the late 70s. Rodgers was a character, whose Air Force training taught him to leave the worries of work at work while living the rest of his life.

For all Spurrier's success in college football, none of his teams compare, for me at least, to the Tampa Bay Bandits, of the United States Football League. The Bandits were owned in part by actor Burt Reynolds and featured aging quarterback John Reaves; they were the fun alternative to a Tampa Bay Buccaneers team that had alienated its fan base through ineptitude on and off the field. From 1983 to 1985, the Bandits were consistently good if not quite elite, playing second fiddle in the league to the Philadelphia Stars and Donald Trump's New Jersey Generals. Most of all, the Bandits looked like an NFL team, to the point where Bandits stock footage has been used in commercials ever since. Bandit Ball was a vague brand of football—and a Jerry Reed song—that could more or less be defined as Spurrier's personality in football form: low-key but not aloof; serious but not necessarily intense; and with a special predilection for onside kicks.

More than twenty years before Mike Tollin let Donald Trump make an ass out of himself in Small Potatoes: Who Killed The USFL?, Tollin made a feature length documentary on the 1985 Tampa Bay Bandits, narrated by an unusually solemn Reynolds. The Final Season has a lot of interesting moments, from Nate Newton trying (and failing) to lose weight to future WWE Hall of Famer Ron Simmons shrugging as teammates Chuck Pitcock and Eric Truvillion exchange words. There's late 80s smooth jazz and an out-of-place split second of full-frontal shower room nudity—in other words, pretty much everything you could want in a sports film.

Simply by dint of his charisma, the film is a Steve Spurrier vehicle, even as he seems somewhat detached from it all. You get Shirtless Spurrier, you get Spurrier discussing roster moves while wearing a black satin jacket, and you get Spurrier lounging extravagantly at poolside while being interviewed for Sports Illustrated. Spurrier is more of a paper doll than the paternal figurehead of the Tampa Bay Bandits, but John Bassett filled this role well. Spurrier is far less brash in these moments than the guy we would later see in press conferences. Even though the Bandits were arguably Spurrier's peak in pro football, his heart was truly in the college game. It makes sense that he went back; it seems strange that he'd ever decide to leave.

We are only hours into Football Without Steve Spurrier, after some fifty years of him being involved in the sport at one level or another. It's hard to imagine what college football was like when Stephen Orr Spurrier started playing at Florida, when the Southeastern Conference was still years away from being fully integrated and the Wishbone offense was the hottest thing around. It's harder still to fully gauge what his absence will mean to the University of South Carolina, and to the college football world in general, but we can say with some certainty that it will be much less colorful. There are not ten coaches who could replace his personality and the sense of fun he brought to a game that is, after all, just a game.