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
You all think I'm the first guy to ever coach against his alma mater, ... This happens a lot around the country.
We've got some building to do. You guys know football as well as I do,
Our plan will be about like everyone else's - not try to let him run all over the place. Our players know what they have to do. They have to contain. You don't just run straight at a quarterback who looks like him. Hopefully, our guys will get off blocks and sort of corral him.
It doesn't matter what I say right now until we play the games. People will write one way or another. That's fair. Opinions are all fair. But until we go play, who knows what's going to happen? But certainly I like the challenge. The opportunity. I like being in Washington, D.C., also. I like being amongst those critics up there, the guys who've never seen our teams play. Several of them are the experts in what's going to happen, but that's okay.
It is embarrassing and I apologize because this is a guy we recruited. When you recruit one and they are troublemakers, or appear to be, it makes you feel bad, so we have to do a better job of recruiting the right kind of kids. We're going to mess up occasionally, like we did with this one guy.
The only thing I think I got was a little humility to the fact that you have a greater appreciation for all coaches. Sometimes you can coach your heart out, hard as you can, and the other guy just may have a better team and better players.
Some guys commit early. Some like to visit through January and commit. That's where we are.
We're not in the upper echelon by any means. We've got to scrape and claw for any victories we can get. I think our guys know we've got to play well. We don't have to play perfectly, but we need to play well to beat these guys.
We don't need a lot of cookies on Thursday afternoon before games. No, my background as a coach, we've never liked showering the guys with a lot of praise before the game. I don't know how that helps.
We divided them as evenly as we could. We obviously have a few guys that have to play for both teams. They'll be on the Green team. It'll be the Garnet, Black and Green guys and they'll play for both teams.
We don't have that person. It's hard, ... We're not looking for that person right now because no one plays that well that's a senior or an older guy. We just don't have an older guy that is a dominating-type player that can be a leader.
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.
Hopefully, we can get some things going to help emphasize the point that here's how we expect you to play and if you don't, the other guys are going to play, even if they're not as talented,
We threw one up, but we should have tackled the guy somewhere. We should have been able to run that guy down, but we couldn't do it. That was just one of the big plays in the game. Nah, 28-7 is no safe lead for us. We didn't force a punt in the second half, so it wasn't safe. They should have scored another touchdown.