When there was a fire at Auburn he joked: “The real tragedy was that 15 hadn’t been colored in yet”.
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His overall record against Tennessee is 14-10, and that includes a major upset in Knoxville when he was head coach of the Duke Blue Devils in 1988.
On the December 2008 Sunday of the bowl-pairing announcements, a teleconference was held with South Carolina’s Spurrier and Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz to discuss their Outback Bowl matchup.
Spurrier went 86-49 at USC (44-40 in the SEC), winning 22 more games than anybody else, and his 135 games coached at the program trails only Rex Enright’s 140. He was a first-team All-American at Florida in 1965 and 1966 at quarterback and won the 1966 Heisman Trophy.
The 70-year-old Spurrier said he was often asked over the past several years while traveling across the country how much longer he would coach.
His record was 122-27-1.
Plenty of Arkansas fans didn’t like seeing the Gators throwing passes and attempting field goals with a five-touchdown lead in the fourth quarter.
“Last thing about Georgia and players suspended”. He coached Florida, his alma mater, from 1990 to 2001 and led the Gators to the 1996 national championship and six SEC championships using his innovative “Fun “n” Gun” offense.
When Spurrier brought the South Carolina Gamecocks into Auburn for the first time, the conservative, Bible-belt campus was flooded with t-shirts that read, “I always knew Spurrier was a Cock”.
“Of course, I’m pulling for Shawn”, Spurrier said. “I didn’t wish to attend a spot at which they’d already gained a good number of nationally recognized championships”. From 1993-96, with Wuerffel at quarterback, Florida finished in the top four nationally in scoring every season. Others, a few admittedly not Gamecocks fans, believe Spurrier is giving up on the Gamecocks for golf.
Spurrier was hardly ideal. He was honored as the SEC Coach of the Year by the Associated Press after leading the Gamecocks to a school-record five consecutive SEC victories. “And it’s my fault, I’m responsible, I’m the head coach”, Spurrier said. Instead, they’ve taken another step backward. He called it a resignation rather than a retirement because he said he may end up coaching high school football. “It’s going to start when we play Iowa”. There are too many holes of golf available to play.
Steve Spurrier is one of the strongest and most enjoyable personalities in college football history.
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Sarkisian went 12-6 at USC, where he was an assistant coach under Pete Carroll with the program’s dominant teams of the past decade. He thanked university administrators and students for allowing him the opportunity to coach the Gamecocks, but he ultimately blamed himself for his team’s failures this season.
