Fun Is Done: Steve Spurrier Leaves College Football with a Legacy of Joy

The Ol' Ball Coach didn't get old. Steve Spurrier might be 70, and he might finally be starting to look a bit older, but that's not why his career as a college head coach is over.

Everyone else has gotten old. That's what happened. And that's why he is out of time and place.

Spurrier held a press conference Tuesday to announce that he's leaving the game. And really his legacy, other than being a winner, was that that's how he treated it: as a game. He was fun. That's it. Fun. And that's an important thing, a forgotten thing. Right to the end, he approached football with a young man's attitude. But that didn't fit in anymore in college football, which has been turned over to younger coaches dressed up in old-man personas.

Team	Years	W-L-T
Duke	1987-1989	20-13-1
Florida	1990-2001	122-27-1
Washington (NFL)	2002-2003	12-20-0
South Carolina	2005-2015	86-49-0

"I think I was probably the best coach for this job 11 years ago, but I'm not today. Not today," Spurrier said. "That's the cycle of coaching.

"I feel like this day was coming. It's inevitable; it was coming."

Today's prototype for a coach is a serious, monotonic stiff with a personality that has been ironed out, folded and neatly put away. These guys aren't having any fun anymore.

"He had a reputation for not making football the total priority of his life," said Akron coach Terry Bowden, who faced Spurrier when he was at Auburn and is the son of Spurrier's biggest rival, Bobby Bowden. "He played golf and had fun, but he worked, too."

"He battled my dad, but there were never any hard feelings," Bowden said. "Steve was one thing and my dad was another, but they were both ball coaches. Steve called his own plays at Florida, I was a play-caller, my dad was a play-caller at Florida State. Many coaches are CEO types today. They delegate, organize. But Steve was the Ol' Ball Coach."

Going forward, college football isn't going to see guys like Spurrier anymore, calling Florida State "Free Shoes University." Or saying that a fire in the Auburn library burned books and "the real tragedy was that 15 hadn't been colored yet."

Today, a wide-open, fun offense represents a genius coach who has studied. Spurrier's represented a genius coach who was a joy.

Spurrier ushered in a generation that wasn't hardscrabble but fun and wild. Now he closes the door on it. That's too bad. The coaches of his generation—Bobby Bowden, Lou Holtz, Joe Paterno, even Mack Brown, though he's not quite as old—had personalities and color and style. Maybe not quite as much as Spurrier had, but it's what we'll remember about this whole era. Now it's going, going…

Why has college coaching become a young man's game?

That one's hard to pinpoint. There is natural turnover, of course. But as you look around and see coaches buckling under pressure, you have to figure that's a big part of it.

Even Spurrier seemed to buckle this summer, when he called a press conference and tore into critics. And last year, when he blew off a postgame press conference, other than for a few seconds.

He ran hot and cold, which is far better than lukewarm and tepid. But maybe that's just not what you can do in this era. Maybe you just have to be buttoned-down and take yourself seriously. And maybe at some point, you've made so much money, and there's so much pressure, and you're getting older, and you've saved a few million of the dollars you've been paid, and you think, "I'll just go play golf instead."

Spurrier planned on that. He talked about it when he was in his 50s, that he'd retire in his 60s and just play golf. The truth is, he was playing plenty anyway.

And in today's coaching world, there doesn't seem to be time for that or for anything other than football, football, football.

I'm not sure this is a healthy profession. You see Dennis Erickson, the former two-time national champion coach at Miami and then an NFL head coach, settle in happily at 68 as a running backs coach at Utah. He's away from the pressure but still with the part he loves, coaching.

Maybe that's the way to go for these older coaches because everything has escalated around them. There is so much money in the game that it's as if there's too much air in the balloon.

It's coaching pay mixed with the golden goose—reaching the College Football Playoff. Colleges are willing to take that TV money and pay coaches millions so they can have a shot at the playoff millions. And if coaches don't reach the golden goose, or even get close, then they're going to be out.

It was telling that when I reached out Monday to Terry Bowden, he set up an interview with me for 4:30 a.m. Tuesday his time. Four-thirty in the morning. At 59, he was already up and working, as always.

Spurrier made $95,000 as Duke's head coach in 1989, according to the Post and Courier in South Carolina. He made $4 million this year at South Carolina.

There is just so much money in the game now and such a discrepancy between haves and have-nots.

This week, the game already lost USC coach Steve Sarkisian, who was crumbling with personal problems as well as a team that wasn't approaching its golden expectations. Maryland coach Randy Edsall, who wasn't living up to his team's new spot in the Big Ten, was fired too. And now Spurrier is gone. And it's a good bet Texas coach Charlie Strong would have been out by today, too, if the Longhorns hadn't beaten rival Oklahoma on Saturday.

And it's still only Tuesday.

Spurrier was the coach of the Tampa Bay Bandits in the USFL, the fun league that was competing with the NFL. He built Florida into a national champion, and Bowden said he did that by coming into a smashmouth league "and throwing the ball over us for six or seven conference championships."

He went to the NFL and failed with the Washington Redskins and then came back to college, took over an unimpressive South Carolina program and turned it into a real good one and a real fun one for a decade.

He never won an SEC title there, but he did win 11 games in 2011, 2012 and 2013.

It's sad that he's going out this way, midseason with a losing record coming. He deserved a better ending. He was still winning into his late 60s and will go down as a huge presence in the history of college football.

"I didn't plan on going out this way," Spurrier said. "I planned on being on the shoulder pads of the team coming out of the Georgia Dome with an SEC championship. But that didn't work out."

JOHN BAZEMORE/Associated Press

Terry Bowden said he sat down with Spurrier at a convention in May and they talked for hours about battles between Spurrier and the Bowdens. He said that Spurrier had a "different" personality, always trying to needle people, but that "he can't hide the fact that he has been a loving husband and family man for years. He's one of the good guys."

And just like that, he's gone.

He always rejected old age, worked out hard and made sure he stayed fresh by getting away. His youth is a good example to those 40- and 50-year-old CEO coaches. Loosen up, guys, and have some fun.

Next to Spurrier, they look ancient.

Greg Couch covers college football for Bleacher Report.