Steve Spurrier: ‘I probably do more as a head coach than 90-percent of the guys out there’
South Carolina head coach Steve Spurrier may turn 69 years old in April, but he’s still working as hard as ever.
Spurrier, who has led the Gamecocks to three straight 11-2 seasons, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that physically and mentally, he is “the same as (he) was 20 years ago.”
“I still call the plays and all of that. I probably do more as a head coach than 90-percent of the guys out there, as far as game day and calling the plays,” Spurrier said. “There are not many head coaches who call the plays anymore. So really age is just a number.”
Spurrier said that at the end of the day, winning and losing is what impacts job security and success, not the age of a coach.
“It all comes down to if you are winning and losing, if you’re recruiting well and if your program is on the upbeat and it’s positive. That’s what we all shoot for and obviously it’s not that easy to do,” Spurrier said. “But the age of a coach really has nothing to do with it.”
On the recruiting trail, Spurrier’s age often came up in negative recruiting in recent years as prospects were told that Spurrier was nearing retirement. Three top-10 finishes in the polls have dismissed those notions and Spurrier reeled in a Rivals top 20 recruiting class for the fourth year in a row.
“We don’t run into much of any negative recruiting around here as SEC coaches,” Spurrier said. “We were involved with a player who was being recruited by a Big Ten school. They got negative a little bit with ‘There’s a lot of crime in Columbia, the big city. They don’t graduate players,’ which was completely untrue. They searched for a little bit of everything but the player came with us anyways.”
At 68, Spurrier doesn’t have a definitive answer as to how long he’ll continue to coach.
“I’ve been saying ‘four or five more years’ since I was 55. And now I’m 68 and I say ‘three or four more.’ I will probably be saying that next hopefully if we’re winning, recruiting well, and everybody is happy. Hopefully that’s what I’ll say next year. Who knows?”
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