Editor’s note: As the World Cup continues in the United States for the first time since 1994, The Athletic is looking back at college sports in the 1990s and how much has changed since then. Join us for a couple of weeks of offseason football and basketball nostalgia.
Spurrier’s Gridiron Grille sits on Steve Spurrier Way in Gainesville, Fla., less than five miles from Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. It has a “Work ’Em Silly” tomahawk pork chop, an “Emory & Henry” seafood pasta and a Johnson City tomato grilled cheese sandwich.
And sometimes it even has Steve Spurrier himself.
“I like to go by there around 5:30, 6:30, take some pictures,” Spurrier said. “When I go to the restaurant, I have a trivia question all the time.”
Like this: “I go, ‘I was here 12 years. What was the fewest number of games we won in a season?’ Billy Napier won four and five. So one lady guessed two. I said, ‘Two?!’”
The answer is nine. That was the most games the Gators had ever won in the 80s before Spurrier arrived in 1990. Then they won nine and 10 and nine and 11 and 10 and 12 and 12 and 10 and 10 and nine and 10 and 10 with their former quarterback calling plays and throwing visors and stamping his name indelibly on college football’s most fun decade.
“That’s sort of a record I like,” Spurrier said.
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The kid from Johnson City, Tenn., won a national title and six SEC championships at Florida. (He still says seven — you don’t want to get him started about why the NCAA punished his 1990 team for the sins of Galen Hall’s Gators.) It’s the reason there is a Steve Spurrier Way in Gainesville and that the “Work ’Em Silly” sign is famous in college football circles and that an unconventional passing formation used by a small college in southwest Virginia made the mainstream.
And it’s the reason he’s now the capital “A” Ambassador for the Florida Gators athletic department.
Former athletic director Jeremy Foley “called me up and said, ‘Steve, we’re going to put your name on the stadium, and we’re going to give you an office in the stadium and a job called Ambassador so you’ve got somewhere to go every day,’” Spurrier said.
He comes and goes in that office mostly as he pleases.
“I’m going to drive down there today and piddle around a little bit at the office,” he said. “Maybe come home, work out, we’ve got a park down here about two blocks, and I ride my golf cart down and hit a few golf balls. I keep myself amused a little bit.”
Guys who win two games in a season don’t become ambassadors. Spurrier was 102-22 from 1990 to 1999 at his alma mater. Bobby Bowden and Tom Osborne both had better winning percentages in the decade. However, nobody captured the sport’s imagination or did more to put a school on the sport’s map than Spurrier did in the 1990s by returning to the school where he won the 1966 Heisman Trophy and met his wife, Jerri, to become the game’s most-feared rabble rouser.
He looks back now at a game that has changed fundamentally and is bothered most by that sense of home, or a lack of it, in the age of the whirlwind transfer portal. One of his chief recruiting pitches throughout his time at Florida was, “You’ve got a home to come back to.”
“These guys go one year here, one year there; when they get to be 28, 35, they want to go back and watch their old team play, they say, ‘You’re the dude that left us, you go on about your business,’” he said. “They’re probably just not going to be welcome if they left a school they had some success at.”
The actual game has changed, too. Never seeing a quarterback take a snap under center aggravates him just as much as it does the average boomer fan, maybe more.
“Everybody wants to do the shotgun every play,” he said. “I just think there’s a place to be underneath and run draw plays and fake draw plays, but they get in the gun and make that quick little fake. Very seldom do you ever even see a guy under center, even on the 1-yard line.”
He was tickled when Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti reminded him in December that his way of running offense hasn’t been forgotten. Spurrier and Cignetti met for the first time in New York when Cignetti accompanied his quarterback, Fernando Mendoza, to the 2025 Heisman Trophy ceremony.
“I said, ‘Hey Coach, I’m …’ He said, ‘Oh, I know who you are. I watched every one of your offensive game tapes from the ’90s when I got into coaching,’” Spurrier said.
The idea that any college football fan who was alive in the ’90s wouldn’t know who Spurrier is is obviously laughable. Any football fan, really. He had three stops in professional football, first with the Tampa Bay Bandits from 1983-1985, then with the Washington Commanders from 2002-2003 and finally a brief swan-song appearance with the short-lived Orlando Apollos in 2019.
It was college ball that made him famous, though. He remains the all-time winningest coach at both Florida and South Carolina, where he was 86-49 from 2005-2015, and he is the 14th-winningest coach in the sport’s history with 228 victories.
Asked how he wants to be remembered, Spurrier says, “Just look at the record book.”
“That’s the only way you judge coaches,” he said. “Bill Parcells said one time, ‘What did the guy before him do? What was the coach’s record? And then what was the next guy’s record?’ If he was worse than those two, he wasn’t very good. If he was a lot better than the one before him and after him, then he was pretty good.”
Galen Hall was .686 in six years preceding Spurrier at Florida. Ron Zook was .622 in four years after succeeding him. Spurrier was .817 with 122 wins versus 27 losses. At South Carolina, Spurrier was bookended by Lou Holtz, who had a .471 winning percentage at the school, and Will Muschamp, who hit .483. Spurrier was .637 and took the school to its only SEC title game.
“Pretty simple,” the Ol’ Ball Coach said.
