Could Steve Spurrier have made it in NFL? Two of his former players debate

When South Carolina head coach Steve Spurrier abruptly announced he was stepping down from coaching at the school, it marked the end of one of the great college football coaching careers in history.

At 228 career victories at Duke, Florida and South Carolna — 17 more wins than Woody Hayes — Spurrier helped rebuild three programs and take them to never-before-reached heights. Spurrier might not be on the Mt. Rushmore of college coaches, but how about of this generation — say, the past 30-40 years? Not too many better.

But why was Spurrier a two-year flameout with a 12-20 record with the Washington Redskins, never to be heard from in the NFL again? Could he ever have had success elsewhere in the league? The answer — provided that “Daniel Snyder” or “Redskins” do not fully suffice as reasons in and of themselves — is tricky.

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Spurrier was considered a major coup for Snyder in 2002, landing a coach who was thought to never want to ruin his legacy by leaving a college game he roundly dominated (despite winning but one national title). But there were plenty of suspicious folks who wondered if Spurrier’s “Fun’n’Gun” offense ever could work in the NFL and whether his eight-hour work days would suffice.

The easy answer was a clear no. Spurrier’s offenses struggled to score points in his two seasons (ranked 25th and 22nd in his two years), and the perception was that he believed his X’s and O’s were not nearly good enough to overcome some bad personnel.

But do we know for sure Spurrier told Snyder that he didn’t need talent? That the quarterbacks he had — Patrick Ramsey (16 starts), Shane Matthews (seven), Tim Hasselbeck (five) and Danny Wuerffel (four) — were good enough to get by in the big-boy league?

Certainly, Spurrier endorsed his former Florida Gators, Matthews and Wuerffel, whom he had ridden to great college success. But we can’t be too sure Spurrier had anything to do with the pick of Ramsey, whom the Redskins traded up for while Spurrier was talking to the media about the trades the Redskins had made with their earlier first-round pick in 2002.

True story.

I reached out to two former Gators, Alex Brown and Chris Doering, who played for Spurrier at Florida and in the NFL (and Doering also played for Spurrier with the 2002 Redskins), to get their opinion: Under different circumstances, could Spurrier have made it work in the NFL?

Their opinions vary.

“The NFL is different, man,” Brown told Shutdown Corner. “One, you don’t have all the control. In college football, you pretty much have all the control. Nobody is really overriding it. You want a player? You go recruit him.

“As for the draft or free agency, that’s where a lot of things went wrong. I think Nick Saban falls into that category. I think Coach Spurrier falls into that category. And I really believe Chip Kelly falls into that category. You’re able to get 18-year-old kids to pretty much do what you say if they trust you.”

Doering places a lot of the blame on a bad environment for Spurrier’s failed two-year experiment.

“No doubt he would have been successful had he wanted to be successful there,” Doering, now an analyst for SEC Network, said by phone Tuesday. “I think initially he was getting into a situation that he thought was different than it actually was. You have seen a number of head coaches fail under Daniel Snyder’s ownership. I think there’s a definite issue when things happen over and over again. That’s a common variable that has a lot to do with it.

“I think if [Spurrier] was in the right position, he would have had success. The guy’s a great coach, and that’s transferable to any level.”

Another common gripe about Spurrier in the NFL was that he spent — gasp — too much time away from the facility. It was easy to pick on Spurrier, the avid golfer, and assume his mind was on the links as much as it was on the Redskins. Doering said this assumption is a mistake.

“This is not a guy who went home early,” he said. “People think he’s out on the golf course during the season, but he was not. He just has balance in his life. That’s how you’re able to coach into your 70s. Balance with his family, balance with his work, balance with his hobbies — he knew how to do it.

“There are only so many times you can watch the same film over and over. You don’t have to stay in the office until 2 a.m. to be successful in the NFL.”

Brown said he thinks Spurrier’s NFL struggles have to do with his belief that his system — and not the talent of the players running it — was the most important factor. But what worked at Duke, Florida and eventually at South Carolina, Brown said, was not going to have the same effect with the Redskins.

“He felt he didn’t need an Andrew Luck,” Brown said. “[Spurrier] is so much like Chip Kelly, it’s ridiculous. He believes in his system so much that it doesn’t matter in his mind if he had that kind of quarterback. That just doesn’t work in the NFL. I don’t think he felt he ever needed a Luck or a Tom Brady.”

Brown holds Spurrier in incredibly high regard and calls him Mr. Gator. Brown believes he’s one of the best college coaches ever to walk a sideline. He just thinks Spurrier wasn’t prepared to make the adjustments needed to adapt to the NFL game.

“Danny Wuerffel was amazing in college, but you saw him fail as an NFL quarterback,” Brown said. “It was night and day. He looked so good in college. He was going to be the next big thing. That’s how he looked at it. The NFL is a little different. He believed in his system more than he believed in his players. I think that was his downfall in the NFL.”

Doering played with Wuerffel and Matthews in college and in the NFL and said he played with far worse NFL quarterbacks than either of them. The part of Spurrier’s Fun’n’Gun system that might have come up short was in overreliance on slower-developing pass plays, the lack of quick-pass adjustments and the five-man protections Spurrier used to flood secondaries hoping to find mismatches.

“I think the biggest thing that [Spurrier] would probably admit to is that you can’t run as many seven-step drops in the NFL as you can in college,” Doering said. “The protection just doesn’t hold up as long with the [NFL] talent you see on the defensive lines, especially the defensive ends. That’s one of the things.

“But as far as route combinations and run plays, those were all very common things that are done in the NFL today.”

Doering noted that he saw the first signs of trouble came when the Gators faced more zone blitzes, which were just making their way into college football in the 1990s, especially in their 62-24 loss to Nebraska in the Fiesta Bowl in Doering’s final game at Florida.

“That was one of the things that we struggled with against Nebraska. Our offense, we didn’t have hot routes, really,” he said. “When protections were overloaded, it was the quarterback’s responsibility to see that, check to a three-step drop and get the ball out quickly. When they started throwing zone blitzes at us, you couldn’t read it the same way.”

The offense Doering and the Gators ran in the 1995 system wasn’t a carbon copy to the Redskins’ playbook in 2002, but “a lot of it” was the same he said, with a few adaptations along the way. Still, there were some shortcomings that held Spurrier back schematically in the NFL.

“If you don’t have these smokes and hots [quick routes] like most offenses did, where the quarterbacks and receivers read those on the fly, it’s a downfall of the blocking protection as well,” Doering said.

But Spurrier wanted to do it his way, and when he figured out it wasn’t happening with the Redskins — just as it wasn’t happening with the Gamecocks — Spurrier said adios and never looked back.

“What you saw today [at his resignation speech] is that he’s decisive,” Doering said. “When he makes a decision, he goes in that direction. When he realized it wasn’t going to be successful there at Washington, he got back into where he’s most comfortable in college football and the [SEC], and he’s been pretty darned successful there.”

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Eric Edholm is a writer for Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at edholm@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Eric_Edholm