He coached spring football in 2 leagues. What Spurrier says about colleges’ situation
The first thing Steve Spurrier pointed to was the weather.
The last time he coached was the spring of 2019 in the Alliance of American Football’s lone season. His Orlando Apollos mostly sidestepped one of the pitfalls of playing at a different time of year with a schedule that kept them in the South. But the Ole Ball Coach did have to take his team to Utah for one March game in a snow storm.
“That was one of the most fun games I’ve ever coached,” Spurrier told The State. “I mean, we couldn’t even throw and catch the ball in pregame warmups. Our quarterback couldn’t even hold the ball.
His QB ended up throwing for 244 yards in a 20-11 win.
“I remember telling the team, I said, ‘This will be the memory of a lifetime if us Florida boys could come out here in Utah and win a game in the snow,’” he recalled.
At this point, a decision about a spring season for South Carolina and the SEC doesn’t seem imminent. But the possibility seems to at least be on the table, should games not be feasible in the fall because of the coronavirus pandemic. Looking back at his pro experience, Spurrier pointed out that football is football, spring or fall.
“It was just football,” Spurrier said. “You get your team. You get to meet in the morning, all get a day off, of course. You can’t practice all day and you can’t meet with them all day, so you have to balance it out.”
Pushing the college football season to spring was part of the conversation as far back as late March and early April and has the potential to happen for conferences such as the Ivy League, SWAC and others that have already punted on any athletic contests in the fall. The COVID-19 pandemic of late is showing few signs of slowing down.
Although the Pac-12 and Big Ten have already dropped their non-conference football games, other leagues — including the ACC and SEC — are holding out until closer to the end of July before making decisions. Reports have come out about various fall contingency plans, but all of them seem precarious considering the circumstances.
Spurrier was quick to point out: He’d had his first head coaching job in a spring league back in the early 1980s when he led the Tampa Bay Bandits in the USFL (and he noted current president Donald Trump’s role in that short-lived league as well).
Spurrier said he wasn’t sure what a spring season would look like on the college level, but felt it would interfere with college basketball with the seasons running concurrently.
“I don’t pretend to know what you’re going to do now,” Spurrier said. “But I certainly hope we play. I certainly hope we try to play.”
He pointed out NASCAR managed to have some measure of a crowd with social distancing at the sport’s all-star race at Bristol Motor Speedway. He also said if fall football meant playing with fewer fans, playing at that time should still be the aim.
He’s been pleased to see some parts of college football get to ramp back up, as mandatory workouts started recently, and teams are less than a week away from starting walk-throughs with coaches. He’s also just hopeful things calm down, at least enough to create some normalcy around the sport.
Spurrier said he’s got an office within Florida’s athletic department and has been able to duck in on occasion, with a mask of course. The 75-year-old former Heisman winner won the most games of any coach in South Carolina and Gators history, and went from retired coach to an ambassador role in Columbia to a similar role in Gainesville.
But one thing the pandemic hasn’t led to for Spurrier is more trips to the golf course.
“Not as much as I thought I would,” Spurrier said. “That’s probably my fault. I certainly don’t have a lot to do. I don’t play near as well as I used to. Maybe that’s the reason I don’t play as much.”
