Ol' ball coach past his prime?

Posted November 18, 2008

After a 56-6 blowout loss at the hands of Steve Spurrier’s Alma Mater Florida Gators, the question remains: is Spurrier in fact a failure as the head ball coach of the South Carolina Gamecocks?

My vocally articulate and overly excitable co-host Sid Rosenberg answered this very question on our daily internet television show with a resounding YES! Before I’m willing to side with Sid in tearing down one of the best college football coaches of all time (yes folks, I’m talking about Steve Spurrier) let ‘s review the facts and mull over the situation the ‘ole ball coach is working with.

In order to do so, we travel back in time. The year is 1998 and South Carolina, in all their glory, is 1-10 on the season. This is the year before Lou Holtz would come out of retirement and take over. South Carolina is not relevant in the SEC or the national scene of college football. South Carolina is awful.

Now, it’s 1998 and Lou Holtz has come to town. Unfortunately for Holtz, even a Hall of Fame caliber coach can’t improve this situation. You might think to yourself as a Gamecocks fan at 1-10 there’s only one way to go from here, right? Wrong! In fact, in the first year of Holtz’s South Carolina career there would be another way to go entirely - a perfect 0-11 season.

The year is 2000, and with a change in century comes a change in South Carolina’s luck. Clearly there really is only one way to go from 1999, and up they went, with eight wins and only four losses; an incredible turn around for a previously completely irrelevant team. To add to the resume, the Gamecocks beat Ohio State in the Outback Bowl to cap things off.

The next year, 2001, would bring more of the same good fortune to the University of South Carolina. Holtz finishes with a 9-3 record in his third year at the helm and leads his team to another Outback Bowl victory over, once again, the Ohio State Buckeyes. The nine wins for South Carolina are the second highest in the program's history.

Let us fast forward to 2005 when Steve Spurrier comes into the picture. He takes over a program that has experienced surprising success in the early decade, but is not expected to have a winning season. Win they would. The Gamecocks put on a show in the SEC with five straight conference W’s, including big wins against Tennessee in Knoxville (the first in program history) and a win over the 12th ranked Florida Gators (South Carolina’s first ever conference win over Florida). Steve Spurrier is named SEC Coach of the Year by the Associated Press and finishes the season with a 7-5 winning record.

Spurrier’s second year, 2006, brought more good fortune. An 8-5 season will follow with all five losses coming to ranked opponents. A trip to the Liberty Bowl on December 29th makes Spurrier the first coach in South Carolina football history to go to two bowl games in his first two seasons.

By 2007, South Carolina is on the map, not just in the SEC, but they are now relevant nationally. With huge wins over No. 11 Georgia and an undefeated No. 8 Kentucky team, Spurrier’s Gamecocks climb to No. 6 in the national and BCS rankings. Despite the high felt across Gamecocks nation, for the first time ever, Spurrier’s squad would admittedly struggle down the stretch finishing at .500 on the season.

The year is now 2008 (no, really, it is) and South Carolina has four losses to their name: Vanderbilt, Georgia, LSU and Florida. For a moment, let’s consider the names I just rattled off. Vandy this season. was ranked for the first time and became an actual SEC factor. South Carolina played them early in a close game no one expected to be as tough as it was. Georgia was ranked No. 1 nationally at the beginning of the season and remained a huge force in the SEC until being knocked out of SEC East contention late last month. LSU is the reigning National Champs while the Florida Gators, South Carolina's only double digit loss of the season, are on a path to possibly becoming this year's National Champs (or at least contending for it).

South Carolina has seven wins to their name as well this year with a winnable Clemson game left to play. Another eight win season would undoubtedly be another successful year by South Carolina standards. This is a team without a storied history of winning (as we learned thanks to my nifty research). This is a team that went 1-10 and 0-11 back to back in the years before Spurrier took over (just in case you skipped to the last paragraph of this blog). This is a team Spurrier has broken records with and marked firsts (again with the nifty research). Is Spurrier a failure as the head ball coach of the South Carolina Gamecocks? Absolutely not! You’ve got to look at where they’ve been to fully appreciate where he has them going.