After a career of more than 50 years in football, Steve Spurrier finally called it quits this week.
"The Ol' Ball Coach" announced he would be stepping down from his current post as head coach at South Carolina, where he had been at the helm for nearly a decade. After guiding the Gamecocks to three straight 11-2 seasons from 2011-13, Spurrier saw his record fall to 7-6 last year and 2-4 this season—including an 0-4 start in SEC play.
Across 26 seasons at the collegiate level with Duke, Florida and South Carolina, Spurrier finished with a head coaching record of 228-89-2. He also spent two years in the NFL as the head coach of the Washington Redskins, leading them to a pair of third-place finishes in the NFC East and a 12-20 record.
Durham is where Spurrier earned his first head coaching gig, taking over prior to the 1987 season after previously serving as the offensive coordinator for the 1980-82 Blue Devils. He succeeded Steve Sloan, who left behind a downtrodden program on the gridiron that failed to win more than four games in any of Sloan's four seasons.
Spurrier immediately surpassed that total in his first go-round, winning five games in 1987 and surprising the college football landscape with a 7-3-1 season in 1988.
Then came the magical 1989 season, which forever made Spurrier a beloved figure among Duke football fans. The Blue Devils started the season off on the wrong foot—going 1-3 out of the gate—but a 21-17 upset of then-No. 7 Clemson galvanized the team and served as a spark plug for a mad dash to the ACC Coastal Division Championship.
Duke lost just one more regular season game that year, finishing with an 8-4 record overall and a 6-1 mark in conference play. Spurrier's Blue Devils won a share of the conference championship for the first time in 28 years, and earned a bowl bid as well—falling 49-21 to Texas Tech in the All American Bowl.
Even after he left Durham for Gainesville—where he won the 1996 national title—Spurrier has retained a soft spot for Duke. He became notorious for voting for the Blue Devils in the weekly Coaches' Poll, even as the program turned in a monotonous string of losing seasons.
In more recent years as current head coach David Cutcliffe has turned around the Duke program, Spurrier has maintained contact with the place where his coaching career kicked off. Spurrier and Cutcliffe have established a good relationship, and Spurrier returned to Wallace Wade last season as part of a ceremony honoring the 1989 squad.
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