Steve Spurrier

Stephen Orr Spurrier (born April 20, 1945) is a former American football coach and quarterback. He played 10 seasons in the National Football League (NFL) before coaching for 38 years, primarily in college. He is often referred to by his nickname, "the Head Ball Coach". He attended the University of Florida, where he won the 1966 Heisman Trophy as a college football quarterback with the Florida Gators. The San Francisco 49ers picked him in the first round of the 1967 NFL draft, and he spent a decade playing professionally in the National Football League (NFL), mainly as a backup quarterback and punter. Spurrier was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a player in 1986.

After retiring as a player, Spurrier went into coaching and spent five years as a college assistant at Florida, Georgia Tech, and Duke, where he began to develop his innovative offensive system while serving as the Blue Devils' offensive coordinator in the early 1980s. He was hired to his first head coaching job by the Tampa Bay Bandits of the United States Football League (USFL) in 1983 and led the team to two playoff appearances in three seasons before the league folded. Spurrier returned to the college ranks in 1987, serving as the head football coach at Duke (three seasons), Florida (12 seasons), and South Carolina (10.5 seasons), amassing 122 total wins and an 82% career winning percentage. Between his stints at Florida and South Carolina, he led the National Football League's Washington Redskins for two seasons with less success. Spurrier retired from coaching in 2015 and became an ambassador and consultant for the University of Florida's athletic department, though he briefly returned to the sidelines to coach the Orlando Apollos of the short-lived Alliance of American Football in 2019. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach in 2017, making him one of four members to be inducted as both a player and a coach.

Spurrier's teams were known for winning with aggressive and high-scoring offenses, and he became known for teasing and "needling" rivals both before and after beating them on the field. Spurrier's 1989 Duke squad won the program's only Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) championship since 1962. He is the winningest coach in both Florida and South Carolina program history, making him the only coach to hold the record for most wins at two different Southeastern Conference (SEC) schools. Florida's streak of four consecutive SEC championships in the mid-1990s is the second-longest in conference history behind Bear Bryant's 1970s Alabama teams, and Spurrier is second to only Bryant in total wins with an SEC program. And when Florida quarterback Danny Wuerffel won the Heisman Trophy during the Gators' 1996 national championship season, Spurrier became the only Heisman Trophy winner to coach another Heisman Trophy winner.

In recognition to his contributions to the university and its football program, the University of Florida officially renamed the Gators' home field "Steve Spurrier-Florida Field at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium" in 2016.

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