Sorry Spurrier, but you're irrelevant now

At 6-4 and staring headlong at another .500-ish season, Steve Spurrier has to be going into this week's game against his former team thinking, "Dude, where's my legacy?" But the Head Ball Coach said this week that he's not retiring. "Again, I hope and plan to go three or four more years here, something like that," he said. "We'll see what happens." The question is: does anybody care? Spurrier, once the brightest lightning bolt in college football, has become like an aging boxer in search of past glories: too stubborn and delusional to know that it's over, and wholly unaware of the tarnish enveloping his legacy. Since coming to South Carolina in 2005 he's never had fewer than five losses in a season, never coached in an SEC Championship game, and failed to spark passion in anybody, even those who hate him. He can't even rile up Georgia fans anymore. People who once burned him in effigy now greet him with a shrug and a yawn. It's sad, really. This is a man who won at least nine games in each of his 12 seasons at Florida, was SEC coach of the year five times, won six SEC championships, and one national championship, but, like Celine Dion, all that went out with the '90s. Urban Meyer is the new Gator King. If Spurrier's name weren't carved on the upper deck of the stadium a lot of Florida students would be saying, "Steve who?" Sure, there's still the visor-throwing, the grimaces, and the towels stuck in goofy places, but the brilliance has waned. No more is Spurrier an offensive savant whose brain should be studied. Now he's just another coach who rambles on, mangling syntax through long, long stream-of-consciousness sentences delivered in a clipped Southern cadence that sounds like someone tuning a banjo. In the old days that was part of his charm — the eccentricities of a mad genius. Now, the optimistic platitudes make you want to pat him on the arm and say, "There, there, Mr. Spurrier. There, there." On his current team: "We haven't played all that well lately, but I'm proud of this team, I think all of us are. This team is already bowl eligible, a team that had a lot of unproven players at a lot of positions at the start of the year. We're 6-4 — could be a little worse, could have been a little better, but overall pretty good for what we've been able to achieve this year." On his inability to take South Carolina to the next level: "You know, you look back, and we just haven't been able to put it all together as they say. We got six new coaches here from the previous years, and we hope and believe our recruiting is a little bit better. I'll tell you what, though: we're bowl eligible for five straight years, something that's never happened in the history of the school here. So, we haven't been terrible, but we've only gotten just a little better than .500. But, you know, you look around the country, I've got a bunch of buddies in coaching who wish they were bowl eligible right now. Yeah, we're not tearing them up this year, but we got a lot of young players, and we hope our big years are coming in the next two or three years here." On his quarterback, Stephen Garcia: "Well, he's got a pretty good idea what's going on now. He was a lost Gamecock down in the Swamp last year. Hopefully, you know, he's going to go out there and make good decisions. He's got to continue to make a commitment to learn the game, learn how to play, learn how to audible here and there, learn how to get out of a bad play and try to get to a good play and just take more time to study the game and say, 'what am I going to do in this situation, and this one, and this one and this one,' and just continue to strive to learn everything he needs to know about playing quarterback." At times he sounds like a character in a Coen brothers movie, one of the quirky ones you pull for even though you know the plotline isn't going to end well. Expect another pock on the legacy this weekend. Florida has beaten South Carolina by a combined score of 107-37 in their last two meetings. Like a once glorious heavyweight champ crawling into the ring on tired legs, the Head Ball Coach is, unfortunately, headed for another beatdown: one that nobody wants to see.