Pretty good article from the Atlanta Journal Constitution about Spurrier and this topic. Can Spurrier Win SEC At South Carolina? Can Spurrier get it done at Carolina? By Mark Bradley | Friday, September 7, 2007, 07:59 PM The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Mark Bradley Columbia — Steve Spurrier is funny in a funny sort of way. He doesn’t really crack jokes. He doesn’t spin slice-of-life yarns. What makes him entertaining is that he, alone among football coaches, is incapable of hiding his feelings. He’s 62, but he has the emotional filter of a 9-year-old boy — which is to say, none at all. If he’s happy, he looks and acts happy. If he’s disgusted — this is the really good part — he tells you so. He might not actually say, “I’m disgusted,” but he’ll wince and roll his eyes to such exaggerated degree that there’s no missing the message. (A printed transcript doesn’t begin to do justice to a Spurrier news conference.) And if this week’s message happens to contradict a just-launched PR offensive … well, too bad. Spurrier spent the offseason suggesting that South Carolina, the program he has coached since 2005, is ready to win an SEC championship. Given that the school has been playing football for 113 years and still doesn’t have a winning record — the Gamecocks are 516-517-44 — and has managed only four bowl victories and one conference title of any kind (the ACC in 1969), this struck many as a reach. In a bit of jujitsu, the Gamecock Club took a televised comment from ESPN’s Lee Corso — “I don’t think Spurrier can win the SEC or national title, I don’t care if he coaches here 400 years” — and made it the focal point of a fund-raising campaign. Go to letsshowcorso.com and you’ll find a message from Spurrier, highlights from signature victories over Tennessee, Florida and Clemson, plus an animated game where the user can toss footballs at an unconvincing likeness of Corso. South Carolina proudly unveiled this Web site and screened the video on the scoreboard at Williams-Brice Stadium just before last week’s opener against Louisiana-Lafayette. And what was Spurrier saying after the halting victory over the Ragin’ Cajuns? That perhaps the naysayers had a point. From his Sunday teleconference: “We’re just a bunch of average stiffs. We don’t need to think we’re any good.” From his Tuesday media briefing: “Maybe I’ve overstated our team by throwing out some goals. ‘That guy’s crazy. What’s he talking about?’ “ And this: “Those two teams [Clemson and Florida State in their televised Labor Day game] were flying around, going crazy on defense. If we can get to that level defensively, we can talk about the SEC seriously instead of maybe just dreaming about it.” Part of Spurrier would love to believe his Gamecocks can win at the highest level because he’s smart enough to make any team win. But that’s the tangle: Is a great coach — which Spurrier indisputably was at Florida, where he took six SEC titles and the 1996 national championship — still capable of greatness when presiding over a program that has known only mediocrity? Said Corso: “Eighty percent of the college games I ever saw were won by the guy with the best players. Hello? You don’t outcoach people in the SEC. If anybody can win the SEC at South Carolina, it’s Steve Spurrier. I’ve said that a million times. … But Paul Dietzel won a national championship [at LSU], and he couldn’t do it [at South Carolina]. Lou Holtz won a national championship [at Notre Dame], and he couldn’t do it. Those are all facts.” The wily Holtz lifted the Gamecocks from 0-11 in 1999 to 8-4 in 2000 and 9-3 in 2001, beating Georgia twice running. But Holtz still retired with a losing record in his six South Carolina seasons, which would indicate there’s a ceiling on what even the absolute best can achieve. But here’s this from Holtz: “I absolutely think Steve Spurrier can win the SEC. It’s very difficult to take a program at the bottom and win a championship with it, but we made it respectable. … They have an excellent stadium, good facilities and championship fans. I’ve talked to Steve, and he thinks he can do it. And he’s already beaten Tennessee and beaten Florida, and he could possibly beat Georgia Saturday night.” And what of his ESPN colleague’s skepticism? “If you go check Lee’s record,” Holtz said, “I think you’ll find it’s not 100 percent.” On this issue, however, Corso has it right. It’s one thing to pick off Tennessee or Florida or Georgia in a given season, quite another to do it with regularity. Spurrier has coached as well at South Carolina as he ever did in Gainesville, but this has enabled him to go 7-5 and 8-5, not the 9-2 and 10-2 of his first two Florida seasons. (FYI, the Gamecocks have only had one 10-win season — Joe Morrison did it in 1984.) Back to Louisiana-Lafayette. At Florida, Spurrier’s teams would win that sort of game 62-14. South Carolina won 28-14 and needed a defensive stop to do it. Said Spurrier: “I was hoping we were past that kind of game. We’re not past it the way we’ve been playing. … We’ll try to fix it, but maybe we’ll figure out that this is the best we can do and we are what we are.” Also this: “We stopped Wofford [in a 27-20 victory last season], and we stopped Louisiana-Lafayette, but I hope one day we won’t have to depend on a goal-line stand to win that kind of game.” Much has been made of Spurrier’s latest recruiting class, adjudged the nation’s seventh-best by Scout.com. But it must be noted that four SEC schools were still rated ahead of South Carolina, and that at least half the league’s entries possess a tradition the Gamecocks conspicuously lack. As defensive end Eric Norwood, who’s from North Cobb High but who grew up in Texas, said: “I’d never heard of South Carolina.” Asked what his perception of South Carolina was when he was coaching Florida, Spurrier said: “Our view was like everybody else’s — they were a little bit above Kentucky and Vandy [in the SEC East] and not quite on the level of Tennessee and Florida and Georgia. That’s about where we’ve been and who we were.” About here, another coach would have fallen back on his Talking Points — we’re changing all that, we’re bound for glory, et cetera. Spurrier being Spurrier, he took the unvarnished tack. “Heck, Kentucky finished ahead of us last year,” he said. “So maybe they’re being viewed as ahead of us.” This doesn’t mean Spurrier is conceding anything: If all else fails, there’s always the chance the Evil Genius will conjure up something. (He’s the best seat-of-the-pants coach ever.) But Corso’s point — that you don’t scheme your way to the SEC title — figures to be borne out over time. Owing to Spurrier’s magnetism, South Carolina has begun to accumulate good players. Florida, Georgia and Tennessee amass great players as a matter of course. Not coincidentally, the Gamecocks’ all-time record against those programs is 20-84-7. “The first two years I tried to be realistic and talk about winning more games than we lost,” Spurrier said. “But then I started to think we had a chance to [win the SEC], and I put that in the back of my mind. And if we could manage to win this game on Saturday or some other games, we might have a chance. We’ll know a lot more about our team after the game Saturday.” And that sounded optimistic enough. But only two minutes earlier, the cold-eyed Spurrier had said: “Maybe our best team is down the road.” One game into the season that both he and the long-suffering legions of Gamecocks fans targeted as their time of arrival, the Ol’ Ball Coach is already wondering if he has the resources. And, just maybe, if Corso’s 400 years will be time enough.
I don't know about the SEC Championship, but seven people in the contest believe that Stevie will beat Georgia, their first hurdle in the quest. Cindy and I are two of the seven.
Spurrier has now beaten Tennessee, Florida and Georgia. However it still remains to be seen if he can beat them frequently enough to win the SEC East or the SEC. Believe me I'm a Spurrier fan but I am not a believer yet that he can beat all those schools in the same year. But I'll sure be rooting for him in all but one of his SEC games. :twisted: :twisted:
Would like to have seen that Uga-USCe game. With approximatley the same yardage on offense, UGa scored 23 fewer points against USCe than OklSU. Looks like the gamecocks did much better in run defense against Uga than they did against LaLafayette. Maybe the old HBC is becoming a dfensive maven, too.
umm <t>I dont think it should be lost that the HBC took his pack of weak sister gamecocks to one of the SEC's toughest venues and managed to make it look pretty easy.<br/> <br/> The 'cocks had control of this game, and every time it appeared that the Dogs were going to seize control of the game, SCAR ripped their heart out and sent them packing. This win was rather methodical..<br/> <br/> SOS made the point of saying during and after this game, South Carolina can play MUCH better than they've shown... But they just walked out from 'between the hedges' with a conference and division win against Georgia. My appreciation for this pain in the ass is really growing.</t>
It has always been said that Steve Spurrier could take your players and beat his players any day of the week. That man can coach and this is the same hardnosed SouCar team I saw in Gainesville last Nov. by the way.