Steve Spurrier

Steve Spurrier
Stephen Orr Spurrieris a former American football player and coach, having served as the head coach of three college and two professional teams. Spurrier was also noteworthy as a standout college football player, and he spent a decade playing professionally in the National Football League. Spurrier retired from coaching in 2015 and now serves as an ambassador and consultant for the University of Florida's athletic department...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth20 April 1945
CountryUnited States of America
We're not a well-oiled running machine by any means right now. It wasn't very pretty for our offense. Hopefully we'll learn from it and go on. We did practice well this week. But right now we practice better than we play the game.
Certainly, Blake has improved. He has certainly learned what's going on, and he should play much, much better this year. I hope we have some coaches around here so our guys improve from one year to the next.
I don't know exactly what our offense is going to look like, ... It should be very similar to what we did at Florida. We hope to be a balanced team with the run and the pass. We hope to be able to run the ball straight at teams, and if not, try to throw it over their heads.
Sidney Rice and Blake and all those guys had some super performances, ... Sidney, you know they're trying to stop him. He's close to unstoppable. Everybody's stoppable but he's some player. Little Kenny McKinley made a bunch of key catches all over the place. It was a fun game. This was big for our football program and the University of South Carolina. Hopefully we can gain some confidence and build on it, and not let it get to us.
We have to change our ways, that's a positive. Hopefully we won't put a performance like this on again. Even though Alabama is a bigger and stronger team, we should have bee more competitive. A turnover here or there may have helped us win the game, but we got no turnovers.
When you have 40 days off, as both us and Missouri have had, some teams can be better or worse, so hopefully we'll be better.
We felt like Blake is much better prepared mentally, physically. He's had an excellent summer working out, and it's clear to all of us here that he's our best guy to go out there. So when it's obvious, we've named him the starter. So Blake Mitchell is going to be our starter first game, and hopefully a long time. We'll go from there. Back-ups we don't know yet, we're trying a lot of guys right there. But Blake's earned it and he's our starter.
We're not where we hoped we'd be, but we've still got a lot of season left, ... We're not discouraged. We're disappointed that we haven't improved as we've gone thus far.
I think it was best for all concerned. I had already done my things there and I left, and to do it again wouldn't have made sense for me or for Florida. So I hope people can realize it was time to move on. I feel fortunate South Carolina offered me a chance here to try to do some things that have never been done before. Almost every victory around here is the first time that ever happened.
He's just going to play through it. We're going to stick with him. He's OK. Hopefully he can learn from it. That's what you almost have to do -- let a young guy go play and learn from this. He's got a lot of potential. But we can't ask him to throw 50 passes every game. That's for sure.
He's still gimpy. But he's not much of a runner, anyway. So hopefully he won't have to move around too much. Get rid of it quickly.
Hopefully our guys will represent themselves, our university and our team in an all-out-effort performance this week.
Hopefully our crowd will be here. We have a lot of recruits coming and it's always good to have 25,000-30,000 at the Spring Game. That would be a nice crowd. Turn out and support our guys and our players can put on a performance as if they know what they're doing.
Hopefully everyone here will know where to send our money as soon as the information comes on that. It is a tragedy that all of us are thinking about.