Getting Swole/Shirtless With Steve Spurrier

Given that most of them hail from the genus Golfus Daddus, one of the least interesting demographic tranches in American public life, it probably shouldn't be surprising that college football coaches are mostly so boring. Still, there is the nagging sense of missed opportunity. These men are the best-paid and most recognizable state employees in the states in which they work; in many football-crazed states, they are the only state employees that anyone in the population is even remotely okay with paying at all.

And yet most of these dudes are somehow even duller than all the drippy-righteous congressional representative and mayo-blooded Senators that are their closest peers. It is as if their ubiquitous school-logo polo shirts had linked into their nervous systems, turning their spines and brains to 100% poplin cotton. You don't need to care about college football to wish that more college football coaches—more humans, even—were like South Carolina's Steve Spurrier.

This is certainly not to say that Spurrier is anything but a high-test golf dad; he absolutely is, and there is, with circa-now Spurrier, always the sense that someone has hastily Photoshopped a three-iron out of his hand in every photo. It's just that Spurrier seems to be getting a little bit more enjoyment out of life, and putting a little bit more into it, than the buttoned-up androids in his cohort.

He jokes and banters and smiles more than any two of his peers combined. He trolls those peers relentlessly and with evident delight. His relationship with Dabo Swinney, his dopey and easily riled in-state rival at Clemson, is pretty much that of The Dukes of Hazzard with Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane, with Swinney in the role of Man Angrily Spiking His Visor Into The Dust after Spurrier chucklingly leaps his golf cart over a roadblock. This is hard work, especially for a man who will turn 70 on Monday. Josh Kendall of The State set out to discover how Spurrier keeps everything so nice at 69, and wound up living every journalist's dream—getting pretty thoroughly owned by a 69-year-old football coach in a low-weight/high-rep workout while Randy Travis songs blast.

Kendall's column on the experience is pretty delightful, if only because there's so much Spurrier-ing in it—"Oh, you can't do that?" Spurrier says when Kendall drops out of a round of leg lifts. "My grandson can't do that one either." The video of Spurrier's workout is maybe best for aficionados of bandanas and pale adult thighs, but there are Spurrier-y delights to be learned there, too. For instance, check out this video—definitely not a GIF, you should watch it to the end—of Spurrier's crunch routine.

That's a lot, right? Seems like even more than the 200 that Kendall specified.

An added bonus of all this is that it gives us something like an answer to a mystery that has haunted college football for some time. This Vine, from late 2013, was purported to be footage of Steve Spurrier doing an exercise called Humping The Dickens Out Of An Exercise Ball. It seemed reasonable, but was unconfirmed.

Given all that has come to light, Vice Sports feels comfortable confirming that the man rogering the shit out of that exercise ball is South Carolina head football coach Steve Spurrier. Stay at it, Coach. The game needs you.