An excerpt from The Spurrier Effect: How One Coach Transformed Gamecock Football

Some personal news in which South Carolina football fans may find some interest: On August 18, I have a book coming out. Alongside co-author Brent Silvia and USC Press, I am happy to announce The Spurrier Effect: How One Coach Transformed Gamecock Football.

The Spurrier Effect chronicles Steve Spurrier’s tenure as the head coach of the Gamecocks, including behind-the-scenes notes on the hiring process, the Head Ball Coach’s recruiting efforts, and an entire chapter on the first lady of Carolina football, Jerri Spurrier. Quarterback Connor Shaw wrote the foreword, and Coach Spurrier worked with us the entire way to put this book together.

Like Spurrier, this book keeps a heavy focus on ball. It includes a look at every game of the greatest era of South Carolina football. However, there was more to the HBC’s story than just the games on the field, and The Spurrier Effect includes a glimpse into some of that.

Below is an excerpt from The Spurrier Effect: How One Coach Transformed Gamecock Football, specifically the entire third chapter, named “A New Era Begins.”

*It should be noted that the book will be formatted differently when printed. This excerpt from the third chapter also follows Shaw’s foreword, a note from Spurrier, a brief prologue, a chapter one on the hiring process (“Uncharted Waters”), and a chapter two on Jerri Spurrier (“Jerri Spurrier, Head Ball Coach”).*

Pre-order links:
Amazon
USC Press

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Chapter Three: A New Era Begins

It was a Tuesday. Normally, there isn’t that much remarkable about Tuesdays, and most Tuesdays that follow the South Carolina–Clemson rivalry game are reserved only for reflecting on what transpired on the field, exercising in-state bragging rights, and looking forward to bowl season as the final act of the football year.

This one, though, was not a typical Tuesday. November 23, 2004, was a landmark day in Columbia, and a day that most Gamecock fans could hardly believe would ever happen. This particular Tuesday saw the legendary Steve Spurrier introduced as the head coach of the South Carolina football program. In the week leading up to this special Tuesday, many had heard rumors that this might happen, and most, by this point, had heard it officially. However, by the time the 23rd of November rolled around, any remaining doubts and just-can’t-believe-it feelings vanished as the Head Ball Coach was introduced.

The Press Conference

Spurrier was nervous—not sick to his stomach nervous, just fidgety and excited. He recalled recently that he was just “ready to go.” However, he had to get through his introductory press conference before he could get to work. After then-president Andrew Sorenson and athletic director Mike McGee opened the presser, Spurrier spoke for just over 20 minutes to the entire group of media in the room and then, immediately, spoke to the press in one-on-ones. He told the assembled media that he appreciated McGee and the easy conversations that led to him accepting the job. “There wasn’t a whole lot of negotiating back and forth. They wanted me, and I wanted to be here,” he explained.

One thing above all else was clear in both settings: He couldn’t wait to start coaching college football again. Anticipation and excitement dripped out of every Tennessee-drawled word and eager fidget. He also was confident. It isn’t easy to combine nervousness and confidence, but he managed to make it happen. It was clear that there was not a shadow of a doubt within Stephen Orr Spurrier that he would lead the South Carolina football program to the highest heights they had ever reached. During his time in front of the mic, he mentioned competing in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) being a primary goal, something that seemed like a novel concept at the time, as the program had experienced just two winning seasons in conference play since joining the league in 1992. No one knew just how right Spurrier was when he stated matter-of-factly, “I believe everything is here for us to be very successful.”

Steve wasn’t the only Spurrier who was happy to be in attendance that day. Not that this is a new concept for anyone who knows her, but Mrs. Jerri smiled throughout the entire press conference. Her beaming face was a testament to her confidence that Columbia would capture the Spurriers’ hearts and her certainty that the city would love them back. Jerri was confident, as she knew that she was going to continue supporting her husband and his team and that her husband would hold up his end of the deal on the ball field. Scott Spurrier, then known as “Scotty,” flanked his parents in a sharp leather jacket. The high school senior likely had an inkling already that he was getting a preview of the program in which he would play as a walk-on for the next five years.

However, the Spurriers were not the only ones who were celebratory. When McGee finished his time at the podium and proclaimed that it was his pleasure to introduce “South Carolina head football coach, Steve Spurrier,” the credentialed media in the room burst into thunderous applause, cheers, and whistles.

This was no ordinary Tuesday, and everyone around the Gamecock football program knew it.

First Orders of Business

If there was one thing Steve Spurrier made obvious in the offseason leading up to his first year in garnet and black, it was that both the team and the fan base had to change their long-held mindsets about the South Carolina football program. Although things had gotten a little better under Lou Holtz, the Gamecocks were used to losing, and with nothing substantial to contend for on a national or conference scale most years, the annual Clemson rivalry game often was a marker of a season’s “success.”

Spurrier didn’t appreciate South Carolina’s obsession with Clemson, not because he wanted to diminish the rivalry but because he wanted the other games on the schedule to matter, too. The Gamecock football facilities had signs posted with the familiar “Beat Clemson” moniker, but the winning-obsessed HBC tore them down: “I know when I first got here, there were signs all around this place about ‘Beat Clemson,’” he recalled. “I said, ‘We need to try to beat everybody we play.’ I don’t think that’s helpful.”

The move shocked some, but it shouldn’t have. Immediately after his introductory press conference, Spurrier spoke with Columbia sports journalism legend Rick Henry and mentioned three “crucial games” on the South Carolina football schedule. The new hire remarked that “Georgia, Tennessee, and Florida” were those games because they were SEC East contests. Notably absent? The Clemson Tigers.

Spurrier wasn’t opposed to manufacturing motivation—during his tenures at Duke and Florida, he invited Gene Ellenson, a former war hero and defensive coordinator at UF when Spurrier played there, to speak to the team as a means of inspiration—but he felt that the “Beat Clemson” signs overemphasized one game. Every time out on the field mattered, so the signs had to go.

Instead of “Beat Clemson” reminders, Spurrier had the school hang new signs and banners honoring the history of the program. The 1969 ACC championship team led by Tommy Suggs, George Rogers’s 1980 Heisman Trophy campaign, and a few important statistical marks were memorialized. According to their new head coach, to leave their mark on history, the Gamecocks had to remember that it was possible for them to make it.

Another early battle for Spurrier was the infamous “chicken curse.” According to local legend, the curse began when Senator Ben Tillman and engineer Thomas Green Clemson were proposing to South Carolina legislators that the Palmetto State needed an agricultural school to partner with USC, preferably in the Upstate. Allegedly, when the meeting didn’t go well, Tillman slammed a pitchfork into the ground and pronounced a “curse” on the state’s flagship university. Over the years, a large portion of the fan base has believed in this chicken curse.

To be fair, the university’s athletics history provided plenty of compelling evidence to make a chicken curse feel valid. The Gridiron Gamecocks had the most notable chicken curse moment in 1984, a 38–21 loss to Navy in the tenth game when undefeated USC was ranked No. 2 in the country. Compounding the loss, South Carolina had just turned down a Sugar Bowl bid because the team wanted a chance to play in the Orange Bowl against their likely opponents, the Oklahoma Sooners. Had they beaten Navy, the Gamecocks would have been one game away from playing for a national championship against the Sooners. The supposed curse was also not limited to football. Men’s basketball suffered an opening-round NCAA Tournament loss as a No. 2 seed to No. 15 seed Coppin State in 1997, the same year the Gamecocks had gone 15–1 and won the program’s only SEC championship. They then lost to the 14-seed Richmond Spiders in the first round the next year as a heavily favored 3-seed. In 2000, just four years before Spurrier arrived in Columbia, the baseball team had gone 56–10, won the SEC championship, and earned the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament. The Gamecocks looked destined for a deep run in Omaha and, possibly, the school’s first national championship in any team sport, but they suffered an upset defeat to the Louisiana Lafayette Ragin’ Cajuns in the Columbia Super Regional.

Despite public sentiment and the evidence before him, when Spurrier arrived in the fall of 2004, he didn’t take too kindly to the chicken curse superstition, arguing that it was just another excuse for losing. He attacked the problem head-on, accepting it as just another challenge for his competitive nature to overcome as he worked to transform the culture around Columbia.

If Spurrier was committed to changing the fan base’s mindset, he felt he also had to change the mindsets of the players on his roster, and that was a major focus of his first offseason in Columbia. As he explained during an offseason presser, “I didn’t say we are going to win a lot. But we are going to play like winners, and we’ve got a plan in place to teach our guys how to play like winners and play like a champion.”

As part of this attempted culture shift, the Gamecock roster underwent a transformation. In addition to the fallout from the brawl with Clemson in Holtz’s final game, some other disciplinary issues arose. The Gamecock coaching staff suspended or dismissed eight players over his first nine months on the job, helping clean up what had become a team with too many off-the-field issues. Talented players Demetris Summers and Moe Thompson were no longer part of the program, but it didn’t deter the HBC.

Despite the challenges ahead, Spurrier remembers being surprisingly optimistic about the talent on the roster heading into year one. “We still had all kinds of ballplayers,” he said. “Sidney Rice was one of the best receivers I ever coached . . . Kenny (McKinley) too . . . big offensive linemen . . . they just needed a little confidence and a little belief.” Spurrier and his staff went to work instilling that confidence into the roster. Some of it was empowering players to do things they didn’t know they were capable of doing. Some of it, however, was separating the winning football players from the ones who were not going to help the team. A few players, described by embattled linebacker Dustin Lindsey as “little gigglers” who didn’t care enough about winning football games, were weeded out or benched.

Those intentional efforts would eventually pay off as South Carolina fielded a much more disciplined team in 2005 than they did in 2004.

Setting the Stage

Behind every coach are three in-house factors that determine their success: their other coaches, their players, and their game plan. As far as coaching was concerned, one hire was obvious. After playing for his father at Duke, working for him as an off-field assistant at Florida, establishing himself as a wide receivers’ coach at Oklahoma under Bob Stoops, and following his namesake to the Washington Redskins, Steve Spurrier Jr. was the first assistant hire of the new era of South Carolina football, signing on as the program’s leader of the wide receiver room.

Frankly, after the painless negotiations between father and son, the Gamecocks were a bit hamstrung during the assistant hiring process. Athletic directors Mike McGee and Eric Hyman (who held the position for most of Spurrier’s time in Columbia) were hesitant to hire coaches—other than head coaches and coordinators—to multiyear contracts, making it very hard to hire and retain good assistants. For most of McGee’s tenure, multiyear assistants were still uncommon across the sport, but as college football changed, Hyman didn’t adapt, keeping in place the archaic practice of giving out cheap, one-year contracts after taking over for McGee in 2005. Still, despite athletic department policy working against him, Spurrier did his best to build a solid staff in his first offseason.

As part of his hiring efforts, Spurrier actually declined McGee’s initial salary offer to him. “Coach McGee started out offering me too much money,” he explained. “I said, ‘That’s too much.’ He was very generous. I told him to give some of the money to women’s sports and to my assistants.” Spurrier’s decision to offer some of his potential money to prospective assistants eventually led to his head coaching salary being a smaller number than the aggregate total for the assistant coaching pool, a rarity in major college football at the time.

After an initial hire of John Latina didn’t stick, Spurrier brought in John Hunt to head up the offensive line, a coach who had been with Spurrier with the Florida Gators and the Washington Redskins. Another Florida and Washington connection saw Mark Smith hired as the team’s strength and conditioning coach. Spurrier then retained defensive backs coach Ron Cooper, recruiting coordinator Rick Stockstill (who shifted over to coach tight ends from his previous gig working with receivers), and David Reaves to help Spurrier out with the quarterbacks. Co-defensive coordinators John Thompson and Tyrone Nix joined the staff from East Carolina and Southern Mississippi, respectively. Thompson, who was the head coach in Greenville, North Carolina, for two seasons, would work with linebackers. Nix, who had been the defensive coordinator at Southern Miss, would coach the defensive line. Former Florida Gators running back Robert Gillespie was hired in an off-field role but would become the running backs coach for the Gamecocks after Spurrier fired Madre Hill. Jamie Speronis, another name with a Florida relationship, would lead USC’s football operations.

Bringing in talented players was a priority for the new Gamecock staff, especially after the offseason dismissals from the roster. Depending on whose version of the tale is told, one of two prospects was the first to pledge his services to Steve Spurrier and USC. Traditional stories attribute the first commitment to running back Bobby Wallace, a speed-first player from Conway, SC, who would go on to very modest production with the program. However, if anyone asks Coach Spurrier, he claims his first recruiting win came in the form of athlete Kenny McKinley: He recalled, “[McKinley] had already committed, so I asked him about it one time. He said, ‘I read about where you were going to be coming here, so I went ahead and committed early.’ So, I just said, ‘Okay.’ Then, Kenny became as good as most anyone I’ve ever had.” The former high school quarterback shifted to wide receiver and set several then-records for the South Carolina football program, including the career marks for catches and receiving yardage.

The rest of the class included a mixture of holdover commitments from the Holtz regime and some who wanted to join the new-look Gamecocks thanks to the star power of Steve Spurrier. National Signing Day saw USC bring in a crop of freshmen that included recognizable names such as McKinley, Wallace, Nathan Pepper, Lemuel Jean-Pierre, Jared Cook, Jarriel King, Ryan Succop, Mike Davis, and Carlos Thomas.

The new talent and an intriguing group of returners suddenly had much more media coverage than they ever had previously. Blake Mitchell was set to be the starting quarterback, and do-it-all athlete Syvelle Newton had fans excited about what he could bring to the table playing under the offensive creativity of Spurrier. A redshirt freshman basketball player from Gaffney, SC, named Sidney Rice was among the players making a name for himself during the offseason. Young twin defenders Jordin and Dustin Lindsey and future NFL defensive backs Johnathan Joseph and Ko Simpson also practiced extremely well in Spurrier’s first spring.

As for the game plan, well, the Spurrier game plan was going to be simple: Just do enough to win.

The initial plan on offense was exactly what should have been expected from a Steve Spurrier unit: They were going to throw the ball around the yard, getting the ball into the hands of the team’s best playmakers. The Fun-N-Gun offense had served Spurrier well with the Florida Gators and Duke Blue Devils, and as Spurrier once proclaimed in an offseason press conference, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” On defense, the Gamecocks were going to fight to force turnovers and sack the quarterback. Those types of splash plays would help get the ball back to the Carolina offense, and as Spurrier often said during his coaching career, the other team “can’t win if they don’t have the ball.”

A New Mindset

Everything about the 2004–2005 offseason built up the expectations for the South Carolina football program and set the stage for the start of the Steve Spurrier era, ushering in hopes and dreams that were higher than ever for the Gamecocks. Bringing in a hungry Hall of Fame coach who also talks big will raise the standard even before a game is played. Listening to that same coach talk about making history while bringing in a top-20 recruiting class will fire up the fan base even more.

In his introductory press conference, Coach Spurrier borrowed a phrase from the 2004 Boston Red Sox (a team that, just a few weeks earlier, had won its first World Series in over 85 years) when he quipped, “Why not us? Why not the University of South Carolina Gamecocks?” The words had echoed all offseason, and with the work the coaching staff put in during the long nine months between that press conference and the first game of the 2005 season, “Why not us?” became a rallying cry amongst the USC faithful.

Demonstrating the fan base’s excitement, the Garnet and Black Spring Game had a reported 38,806 fans in the stands, although everyone in attendance said that even more people were there. The April exhibition was just one example of hype building in and around Columbia.

As a result of the Spurrier hype, lofty prognostications became the norm among the fan base. Despite historically lopsided losing records against their SEC East rivals (13–33–2 vs. Georgia, 4–9 since joining the SEC; 2–19–2 vs. Tennessee, 1–12 since joining the SEC; 3–19–2 vs. Florida, 0–13 since joining the SEC; only 19–7 combined against bottom-dwelling Vanderbilt and Kentucky since joining the SEC, contrasted with UGA, UT, and UF combining to go 76–2 against the two teams), everyone from season ticket holders to casual Palmetto State football fans believed that Steve Spurrier would change everything at the University of South Carolina.

And they were right.

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