Originally Posted by
budwom
Moreover, in a world filled with coach speak (e.g. we respect their ballclub but we don't fear their ballclub, etc) Steve didn't mince words. If he didn't like someone (Hello George Welsh) he'd say so. I thought that was refreshing.
Steve Spurrier had a really nice touch in "blurting out the truth." As in, if his team lost because of an interception on a broken play, he might say,"I dunno. I thought it was a good idea at the time. I was wrong."
Also impressive were his spontaneous calls. Players who played QB for him at Florida would say, if you're a quarterback on the Florida team, you're going to play. You're a third stringer on the bench, and the head coach yells, "Jones come over here." Then he says, "Go into the game -- here's the play we're gonna run." Refreshing.
I remember when one of Spurrier's successors in Washington, Mike Shanahan, sat a quarterback at the end of the game, and then tried to weasel out of it. "I didn't bench [McNabb?]; he was injured." Spurrier would have said. "Yeah, we were losing the game. I thought Grossman [or whomever] might help us win. I'm just a ball coach."
It also helped that Spurrier was a Heisman trophy winner at quarterback and played in the NFL for a decade (without much success). He didn't need to coddle quarterbacks.
Sage Grouse
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'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013