Spurrier on his USC years: My expiration date had arrived

(From “HEAD BALL COACH: My Life in Football” by Steve Spurrier and Buddy Martin. Published by arrangement with Blue Rider Press, a member of Penguin Random House. Copyright 2016 by Steve Spurrier. Onsale August 30th in hardcover, $28.00.)

A few people close to me probably thought I was naive when they found out I had taken the South Carolina job. They wondered why I would want to coach in a program that had a losing record overall — maybe without much of a chance of winning an SEC title in my lifetime.

My old teammate Tommy Shannon said, “Steve, you don’t want to do that! You can’t win there. Nobody wins there! You’ll be three or four years and then out.”

I remember Jerri saying, “If you take the South Carolina job you’ve got to coach against Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and all those guys.”

And I said, “That’s why we’re going.”

If I’d told them South Carolina, in the past ten years, had a record of 5-35 against Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Clemson, they definitely would have thought I’d become delusional. But I truly believed if we recruited well, given proper support, we could compete and maybe win an SEC championship. And I was willing to give it my best because this was an opportunity to go nowhere but up.

Our program would be built on better recruiting, a steady diet of good fundamentals, and a solid foundation of no-nonsense, no-excuse accountability. Then we wanted our players to exude the confidence that we could change things — that fate quite often would go our way. And we wanted them to have fun in the process of winning.

We already had a large base of passionate fans that showed up at Williams-Brice Stadium, the twenty-third-largest college football stadium in America. For a long time, it was one of the loudest places in the SEC. They screamed and yelled. Even that 0-11 season in 1999 they had a bunch of sellouts. They love their football in South Carolina, win or lose. There are no professional sports in the entire state. It’s all about college sports. South Carolina. Clemson. Coastal Carolina. Wofford. Furman. Citadel. South Carolina State.

Still, it wasn’t going to be easy at South Carolina. We won as many as eight games only once in our first five years. By 2010, in my sixth season, we finally launched the most successful run in Gamecock history.

We began turning the corner when we were able to start keeping some of the blue-chip talent at home, away from other rivals—especially Marcus Lattimore and Jadeveon Clowney, our two most notable recruits. Marcus was just a superb player and person. We were going 7-5 and 7-6 every year until he came along. Against Georgia in his second game he rushed for 182 yards and two touchdowns, breaking forty-two tackles on thirty-seven carries. I had an opportunity to introduce him at one of his speaking engagements years later and said, “Marcus Lattimore changed the face of South Carolina football.” He really upgraded our team.

As we progressed, we also established more consistency at the quarterback position. Stephen Garcia got us started, but along came Connor Shaw and then Dylan Thompson at the peak of our ascent.

We won some big games, especially at Williams-Brice Stadium, probably none bigger than when we knocked off No. 1 Alabama in 2010. The week before, we’d just lost a tough one, 35–27, to Auburn and were 3-1 with an open date before Nick Saban brought his defending national champions to Columbia. South Carolina had never beaten a No. 1.

As Lee Ann Womack sang in “I Hope You Dance,” “Give faith a fighting chance.” About once every couple years I tried to convince our guys if we did that, just maybe it would kick in for us. And so I said: “Fellas, if we give faith the best chance, prepare mentally and emotionally, get plenty of rest, eat correctly all this week . . . we’re going to come to the ballpark with everybody committed to play the very best we can. And that’s going to give us the best chance to beat Alabama. And then let faith take over.” I told them even though we were underdogs, if we played well and the other team didn’t, we could pull off a huge upset. This does happen.

We jumped on Alabama for a 21–3 lead with only a little over a minute gone in the second quarter. Garcia had by far his best game ever as a Gamecock, completing seventeen of twenty passes for 201 yards and three touchdowns. Alshon Jeffery caught seven of his passes for 127 yards with touchdowns of twenty-six and fifteen yards that put us ahead of Alabama by eighteen.

We maximized every scoring opportunity. We punted only twice that day. Scored five touchdowns. Didn’t have to kick field goals. And we beat Alabama 35–21.

From there we went on to win our first SEC East Division title at South Carolina after beating the Gators in the Swamp 36–14 on November 13. Lattimore carried forty times for a career-high 212 yards and three touchdowns.

Despite losses in the SEC Championship game and the bowl game to FSU, the season was a major step in the right direction.With Marcus and the addition of Clowney, we upgraded and launched into a four-season run of forty-two wins, four bowls, and three straight Top Ten finishes (No. 8 in 2011, No. 7 in 2012, and No. 4 in 2013). When we all look back at those four seasons, I think Gamecock fans will cherish them even more as the high-water mark of our ten-plus seasons there.

I could write down a long list of players, but because of space I’m going to single out just a few others: running back Mike Davis; defensive end Devin Taylor; defensive tackles Kelcy Quarles and Melvin Ingram; defensive backs D. J. Swearinger, Johnathan Joseph, Victor Hampton, and Stephon Gilmore; wide receivers Pharoh Cooper and Bruce Ellington; punt returner/receiver Ace Sanders; linebacker Skai Moore; kickers Elliott Fry, Spencer Lanning, Josh Brown, and Ryan Succop.

Connor Shaw was special — our winningest quarterback in school history and one of my favorite players of all time. After we lost to Auburn 16–13 in 2011, I benched Garcia for his lack of consistent play. Connor came in and completed twenty-six of thirty-nine passes for 311 yards and four touchdowns as we hammered Kentucky 54–3. We had found our next quarterback.

There was plenty of buzz about Clowney from South Pointe High in Rock Hill before he played a down because he was the No. 1 recruit in America and was such a force at six-foot-six and 240 pounds. Just think of a guy that large who was fast enough to be a sprinter on his high school track team. Players like Jadeveon don’t come along in your state very often and coaching them is a wonderful opportunity.

In his time at South Carolina, Jadeveon made a huge impact right away. He went on to set school records in quarterback sacks and tackles for loss.

Of all his brilliant plays, there are two that will stand out forever in the minds of Gamecock fans:

1. As a true freshman, sacking Georgia quarterback Aaron Murray at the 10-yard line, creating a fumble that defensive lineman Melvin Ingram returned for a touchdown to put us ahead by ten in an eventual 45–42 win over Georgia in Athens.

2. That bone-jarring tackle he laid on Michigan running back Vincent Smith with eight minutes to play in the Outback Bowl after the 2012 regular season that went viral on the Internet. Not only did Jadeveon stone Smith but he forced a fumble that he recovered and that set up the winning touchdown in our 33–28 victory. Jadeveon’s hit won a 2013 ESPY Award for college football’s best play of the season.

At the end of 2011 we set the table for the future with a 30–13 victory over Nebraska in the Capital One Bowl for our eleventh win, the most in school history. We finished No. 8 in the final polls, also our first Top Ten finish in school history.

Of course, we had 11-win seasons in 2012 and 2013 -- to complete our “Hat Trick.”

When people ask me how we were able to be so successful for three or four seasons and what happened the last two seasons at South Carolina, I tell them maybe we didn’t recruit as well. Plus we lost some of our star players, like Jadeveon Clowney, Kelcy Quarles, Connor Shaw, and Marcus Lattimore. Defensively, we really struggled in 2014 and 2015, as we were at the bottom of the SEC in most defensive statistics.

When every game goes down to the wire, you second-guess yourself. You call a play that doesn’t work and you say, “Gosh, I wish I had called something else. If I had called that play we would have had a minute and a half less in the game and we’d have won the game.”

Then one day that expiration date arrives.

This story was originally published August 28, 2016 at 7:07 PM with the headline "Spurrier on his USC years: My expiration date had arrived."