Where Does Steve Spurrier Rank Among Greatest College Football Coaches?

Steve Spurrier has made his decision. Now comes the debate over where and how the Head Ball Coach should be remembered in the annals of college football history.

Retired or not, the reality is we're likely to never see Spurrier as a head coach in the college ranks again. The 70-year-old has thrown his visor and headset to the ground for the last time, choosing to walk away from South Carolina midway through his 11th season there after getting off to the worst start of any of his 26 years running a program.

Opting to do this now, rather than last winter or after this season ended, has rubbed some the wrong way—"You simply don't quit in the middle of a season, no matter how bad things may seem," Jeff Owens of Sporting News wrote—but such a move shouldn't ultimately impact Spurrier's place among the all-time greats. 

But where, exactly, does he fit on that unofficial list? Let's look at what Spurrier accomplished during his coaching career and how that compares to some of the most notable coaches in FBS history.

By The Numbers

Here are the quick numbers of Spurrier's career: His 228 wins puts him 13th on the all-time FBS list, two behind former Iowa coach Hayden Fry and six behind current Virginia Tech coach Frank Beamer (not counting Beamer's 42 wins at FCS Murray State). Spurrier has won a national title, with Florida after the 1996 season, claimed at least a share of 10 division or conference championships and had 12 years with at least 10 wins.

Spurrier had only two losing seasons—his first, in 1987, and this one—and averaged 8.77 wins per season. He had four 11-win campaigns and a pair with 12 victories, with major accomplishments at all three schools (Duke, Florida, South Carolina) where he coached.

Spurrier vs. Bobby Bowden

The main coaching rival during the height of Spurrier's career was Bowden, the longtime coach at the school Spurrier referred to as "Free Shoes University" and against whom he was often compared.

Bowden won 304 games, two national championships and 12 ACC titles with the Seminoles, going 8-5-1 against Spurrier in the annual Florida/FSU rivalry game as well as a pair of Sugar Bowl meetings. Spurrier won the biggest game in that series, though, claiming his national title in the 1997 Sugar Bowl with a 52-20 blowout over Bowden's Seminoles after FSU won the regular-season meeting only a little more than a month earlier.

DAVE MARTIN/Associated Press

Because they had so much head-to-head interaction, the on-field results can help decide a winner. Bowden's two national titles came during Spurrier's time at Florida, and required going through the Gators along the way, giving him the edge.

Advantage: Bowden

Spurrier vs. Mack Brown

Brown stepped down from Texas after the 2013 season, winning 158 games in 16 seasons with the Longhorns following stops at Tulane and North Carolina. He won a title with Texas after the 2005 season and played for another after the 2009 campaign. After that his results trailed off, much as Spurrier's did in his final season-and-a-half.

At 64 years old, Brown currently does color analysis for ESPN but appears to be interested in getting back in the game and possibly as Spurrier's successor at South Carolina.

Brown and Spurrier's career arcs are similar in that each took over programs that were struggling. Brown went from 1-10 in his first year at Tulane in 1985 to 6-6 two seasons later. Then after two 1-10 seasons to start his North Carolina tenure, he averaged more than 8.3 wins over the next eight years, with three 10-win marks.

Texas had dipped to 4-7 the year before he arrived, but from 1998-2013, he had six seasons with at least 11 victories and recorded a .767 winning percentage.

Brown and Spurrier squared off early in their careers, in 1988 and 1989 in Brown's first two years at UNC while Spurrier was wrapping up his three-year stint at Duke. Spurrier claimed both meetings.

Advantage: Spurrier

Spurrier vs. Bear Bryant

Paul "Bear" Bryant is best known for his long and successful career at Alabama, which saw him win 232 games and six national titles in 25 seasons with the Crimson Tide. But Bryant already had success at multiple stops before coming to Tuscaloosa, including bringing Kentucky its lone national championship in 1950.

Bryant also had an unbeaten season at Texas A&M in 1956, two years after his only losing season in 1954 (his first with the Aggies) and went 6-2-1 in his first year of coaching in 1945 at Maryland. He finished with 323 career wins.

Spurrier has done a lot in his career, but he's a long ways from being as good as the Bear was.

Advantage: Bryant

Spurrier vs. Tom Osborne

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The former Nebraska coach went 255-49-3 with the Cornhuskers from 1973-97, claiming national titles in three of his final four seasons. That includes the 1995 title that was clinched via a 62-24 destruction of Spurrier's Gators in the Fiesta Bowl.

Osborne never had fewer than nine wins in any season, though he also never had to do any program-building as he inherited arguably the most consistent one in the country. Nebraska won two national titles in the three years prior to his tenure, so his legacy is based more on sustaining than developing.

Spurrier vastly improved all three of the schools he coached at, leaving them in better condition than when he arrived. We don't know how Osborne might have fared in such a scenario.

Advantage: Even

Spurrier vs. Bo Schembechler

From 1969-89 at Michigan, Schembechler won 194 games and claimed at least a share of 13 Big Ten titles. Ten of his Wolverines teams went to the Rose Bowl, the pinnacle of achievements during his era, but he only won two of those trips.

Despite winning 10 or more games 11 times, including in his final season in 1989, Schembechler never won a national title. His 1985 team went 10-1-1 and beat Nebraska in the Fiesta Bowl, but the Wolverines failed to win the Big Ten that year and ended finishing second in the Associated Press poll to 11-1 Oklahoma.

Advantage: Spurrier

Spurrier vs. Active Coaches

Of the top coaches still operating in college, Spurrier is most often compared to the likes of Alabama's Nick Saban, LSU's Les Miles, Ohio State's Urban Meyer, Oklahoma's Bob Stoops and Virginia Tech's Beamer. Of that group, only Beamer is without a national title.

Miles and Stoops each have won championship, while Meyer and Saban have multiple titles and have done so at more than one school.

If all of these coaches were to suddenly retire right now, Beamer is the only one who Spurrier would certainly rank ahead of. It's hard to imagine Virginia Tech would have spent as much time as a relevant program as it has under Beamer, but aside from the 2000 Sugar Bowl loss to Florida State, it's mostly just been a run of good but not great teams.

Jonathan Bachman/Associated Press

He might be deserving of a spot ahead of Miles—despite going 0-4 against the Mad Hatter, including last week's 45-24 defeat in what ended up being Spurrier's final game—because of his greater and longer body of work. Compared to Stoops, his former offensive coordinator from 1996-98 at Florida, the Oklahoma head coach has a slight edge but one that becomes less and less with each year removed from the Sooners' last season as a national title contender in 2008.

Meyer and Saban are waged in their own battle for the distinction of best active college football coach and both are in the conversation for greatest of all time, so Spurrier is a distant third when stacked up against that duo.

Final assessment

Spurrier's overall body of work should be judged not just on the wins, losses and titles but also the way he essentially remade his career after the ill-fated dip into the NFL with the Washington Redskins. Unlike many college coaches who failed in the pros, he was able to return to his roots and have success again.

South Carolina had never won more than 10 games in a season before his arrival in 2005, but by 2010, he had the Gamecocks in the SEC title game. Then from 2011 to 2013, he posted three consecutive 11-2 records.

He succeeded at each stop facing different terrain to climb and thus used contrasting equipment and tactics. At Duke he made the most of what he had, which wasn't much, but at Florida he revolutionized the game with his "Fun 'N' Gun" offense that took no prisoners. And when he came back at South Carolina, he switched gears again and turned to a more conventional attack in the face of a growing push toward spreading the field and increasing tempo.

John Bazemore/Associated Press

Spurrier's influence on the game extends far beyond his results or his approach. As CBS Sports' Jon Solomon noted, in 2011 he helped get the ball rolling on the drive to compensate players by offering to pay them out of his own pocket.

"As coaches in the SEC, we make all the money—as do universities, television—and we need to get more to our players," Spurrier said, essentially becoming the father of today's cost-of-attendance stipends.

The College Football Hall of Fame criteria allows for a coach to become eligible for induction immediately after he retires if he's at least 70 years old. If the Head Ball Coach doesn't get in this winter, it won't be long after that.

Follow Brian J. Pedersen on Twitter at @realBJP.