It was sometime around the mid-1990s when I first watched a game on TV featuring Steve Spurrier as one of the head coaches. It was almost surely one of Florida's 1994 or 1995 domination of Tennessee, but I could be wrong about that specific game.
I didn't really understand even half of the intricacies of football at the time because I was just 7-years-old. But I knew I was watching something incredible.
Danny Wuerffel would throw passes to Ike Hilliard and Chris Doering like it was completely effortless. The Gators would storm right up the field, get a touchdown and then do it immediately again when they got the ball back.
I knew this was college football, but there was an element of it that made you feel like the coaches were playing a video game and stole the cheat codes to make it a whole different sport altogether.
College football was supposed to be methodical, played in the trenches and low-scoring. Here was Florida turning everything you were supposed to know about the conservative sport on its head, and not just against the Louisiana-Monroes of the world. They would dominate LSU, Georgia, Tennessee, and Auburn and then do it again the next week against whoever happened to be the poor souls on the schedule.
Obviously, I loved those Florida teams in the '90s. You're also more inclined to be a bandwagon fan when you're younger, and I definitely was, since my home state's namesake school, South Carolina, was awful. My Clemson season ticket-holding grandparents tried to get me to support the Tigers, but that never really took hold. Besides, Clemson could never be as downright cool as Steve Spurrier's Florida.
I remember being so disappointed when the 1995 Gators, who had dominated just about everyone that season en route to a 12-0 record and an SEC title, got ransacked by Nebraska, college football's Leviathan in the mid-'90s, 62-24 in the Fiesta Bowl.
That team was one of my first loves and fascinations as a sports fan, and I couldn't accept that there was a team so much better than those Gators. I really still don't. Those 1995 Gators might as well be the 1927 Yankees or 1972 Dolphins.
The next year, behind Heisman Trophy winner Wuerffel, Florida avenged a November loss to Florida State by demolishing the Seminoles in an improbable Sugar Bowl rematch to win its first national title. But by that time, my family had moved to Arizona, and Arizona State's heartbreaking loss in the previous day's Rose Bowl to Ohio State soured it quite a bit. Nonetheless, it was Spurrier, who hung it up last Monday after 228 wins and 23 winning campaigns in 25 and a half seasons as a college head coach, that helped me fall in love with the sport.
When future fans look back on the record books, fans won't remember Spurrier has his era's most decorated coach. He didn't win multiple national titles, and didn't do it at multiple schools like Nick Saban and Urban Meyer did. He also didn't have the insane streak of consecutive top five finishes like Bobby Bowden did.
However, he'll definitely go down as one of college football's most influential coaches and minds ever. And he'll certainly have meant the most to my fandom, both with those amazing Gators teams and during his time at South Carolina.
As I grew up, I supported South Carolina more and more. Even though it's one of the most success-starved programs in any major conference, it's the namesake school of my home state. In my lifetime as a fan, I've seen a winless season, an absurd brawl that cost the team a bowl game and effectively ended the career of a Hall of Fame coach, and far more .500 or below conference seasons than winning conference records. Those 20 years have been about the most successful in program history.
But I've also seen three 11-win seasons, a quarterback that went 27-5 as a starter, an upset of the No. 1 team in the country and defending national champions, a No. 1 overall draft pick's college career, an SEC East championship (the first ever that wasn't won by Georgia, Florida, or Tennessee), and a five-game winning streak over Clemson from 2009-13.
Every single one of those accomplishments came under the watch of Spurrier.
When the news broke last Monday evening that Spurrier would be leaving the Gamecocks, I was hardly surprised. In fact, I had kind of been anticipating that announcement all season, as South Carolina slogs its way through its worst season in about 12 years. It was hardly a secret among those that follow the program that he'd probably be walking away after this year, and there were even some whispers in the spring that he'd hang it up before the season altogether.
I thought this was ideal, as Spurrier could coach out the season and, with South Carolina unlikely to even get six wins and sneak into a third-rate bowl game, his last game could come against Clemson, who very well could be playing for a playoff spot at that point. What better way to close out a legendary coaching career than by having a chance to wreck your arch rival's season?
So you can imagine my surprise upon realizing the next morning that Spurrier was done effective immediately, and that his last game was the previous Saturday's 21-point loss at LSU, a home game relocated to Baton Rouge due to the historic flooding throughout South Carolina a week prior.
The more I thought about it, Spurrier leaving now was actually the ideal scenario because it was the ideal scenario for him, not what some Joe Schmo fan/writer in Texas would want him to do.
Spurrier, no matter what you think of him, has always done things a little differently. Whether it was his offense, his unconventional and hilarious style with the media, or his needling of rival coaches, he did things his own way. He walked away on his own terms and did it as one of the most admired people to ever work in his profession. We should all be so lucky as the Head Ball Coach.
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