Chapter 3
UNDERNEATH THE VISOR

T he decision to wear a visor on the sideline, when nobody else did, was a point of emphasis: We do things differently around here, and we intend to have fun playing this game of football. That applied to everything: How we practiced and prepared; my attitude about enjoying life; the style of offense we ran and the attacking mode were stayed in right up to the final whistle. We wanted to score every time we had the ball if possible. If the opposition wanted to complain about us running up the score, then have at it.

Our statement was about how we played and what we won: the seven SEC championships and a national title. (Even though the official record book says six SEC championships, I count 1990 as well. We had the best conference record, but an NCAA penalty from 1986 and Florida’s decision to take the penalty that year precluded us from being awarded the trophy for 1990. It went to Tennessee instead.)

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PEOPLE STILL ASK ME why I was called the Head Ball Coach and where it came from. Although maybe they’ll have to refer to me now as the Former Head Ball Coach, or FHBC.

The nickname Head Ball Coach sort of evolved over the years and stuck. In Johnson City, Tennessee, where I played youth and high school sports, the term “ball coach” just described someone who loved sports and taught or coached ball of any kind. A group of us guys in high school played three sports under three different coaches. We just called them ball coaches. “He’s a good ball coach,” we’d say. We dropped the foot in football because there were good coaches in other sports. A lot of people used it—not just me—instead of using the word football .

Football coaches overuse the word football . “He’s a good football coach.” So I just took the word foot out of it and said he’s a good ball coach. If someone coached basketball, he or she would still be called a good ball coach. I once was asked if I could have been a good basketball coach, and I think I could have been, because I think I would have learned how to do it. I used to always tell Pat Summitt, the Tennessee women’s basketball coach, that she would have been a heckuva good football coach. And she would have been, because she inspired her players. Encouraged them. And demanded they play their best. And that’s what good ball coaches do.

At some point I started referring to myself as just a ball coach. Later at Florida, someone referred to me as Head Ball Coach. I’m not sure who started it, but a guy named A. J. Vaughn from Jacksonville, a friend of sportswriter/broadcaster David Lamm, brought me a shirt with HBC on it, and the nickname seemed to stick.

Of course, anybody can adopt the title Head Ball Coach. Matt McCall, the son of my former Florida teammate Wayne McCall, was hired as basketball coach at Tennessee Chattanooga in 2015 and called me to leave this message: “Now I’M a Head Ball Coach, too!” Yes, Matt, you’ve earned that title!

HBC had become part of my so-called brand, to a point where it was the label they put on my headset and sometimes used to refer to me in our football offices. I even got into social media just a little bit and my Twitter handle was @SC_HBC. But I don’t expect I’ll be tweeting much anymore.

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THE VISOR THING sort of began with a superstition about a white cap. In 1989, Duke beat Clemson, 21–17, in a drizzling rain and I was wearing a white baseball-style hat. I said, “I’m going to wear this until we lose.” I hardly wore a visor at Duke—maybe at practice every once in a while. A lot of times I didn’t wear any kind of hat at all, unless it was a cold or rainy day. Well, I wore that hat that day against Clemson and we didn’t lose the rest of the season. That hat was on my head when they carried me off the field at Kenan Stadium in Chapel Hill after Duke became the Atlantic Coach Conference champions. But the visor didn’t become a permanent fixture until I moved to Florida as the Gators Head Ball Coach. Prior to becoming a head coach in Florida, I’d only worn a visor while playing golf, a game I’ve always loved, and a couple times when I was the head coach of the Tampa Bay Bandits. I used to buy visors at every good golf course I played and wear them during my round. So I’ve collected a rather large stack.

Back in 1990 there were no deals with Nike or Under Armour or Adidas. Schools had their own arrangements. Larry Habegger from North Carolina had a company called Coaches Choice. Larry had a wonderful idea and should have gotten the rights. When he visited the Florida campus, he offered to make us visors, hats, shirts, et cetera. They made blue visors and white visors. I usually wore the white one.

When I started wearing a visor as Gator coach, I had no idea it would start a trend. I just decided, “I’m going to the Sunshine State, the Florida Gators, so I need to start wearing a visor on the sideline.” I liked the fact that it was different, but I also liked it because in Florida it was much cooler than a cap.

I’d like to think that’s not the only thing that the Head Ball Coach is known for doing differently. However, the visor was definitely symbolic—part of a plan to break with some traditions and do it my own way. Now numerous coaches around the country wear visors. These Visor Coaches are all just a little bit different.

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WHETHER YOU’RE a coach, a teacher, or the CEO of a large company, you should develop your own brand. If you are going to be a coach, be unique—but be yourself. Dress the way you want to dress. Coach the way you want to coach. Say the things you want to say—the way you want to say them. If you say all the things other coaches say, then you are going to be just like them. You can’t separate yourself from others if you copy them. Coaching is such an individual thing. There are a lot of good coaches you can learn from. And there are some who can show you what not to do. If you choose to be different, as I am suggesting, you can rest assured that others will take notice and often comment.

I have been criticized for my unorthodox coaching style. Early in my career, critics assumed that I wasn’t serious about coaching and accused me of not wanting to work hard enough. I never bragged about how hard I worked like most coaches do. I’ve never bought into the idea that to be a successful coach you must spend long hours at night in your office studying tape.

I tailored my coaching career to fit my lifestyle, not vice versa. I tried to work smart and have fun—to find the joy in winning football while doing things the right way. No doubt players picked up on it. But you have to earn the right to have that fun. Sometimes that means a little restraint is in order. One morning at 6:30 an NFL scout came by the Florida coaches’ office while I was in there watching tape of our opponent that week. He said, “Coach, you’re going to ruin your reputation of not working hard.” I said, “You’re right, so please don’t tell anybody.”

I always encouraged our team to keep competing at all times, right to the end of the game, and never take our foot off the pedal no matter the score—whether you’re winning or losing. Don’t start celebrating until the game’s finished. That’s a problem a lot of people have. In fact, our usual pregame and halftime speeches are “Just keep playing hard and competing. Don’t relax until the game is over.”

Getting your substitutes in the game and letting them take part is important. Winning is to be shared, and it’s a much happier locker room when everybody gets to contribute. It helps build the team. That was one of the keys to our success at Florida—getting a big lead and letting the backups log in some playing time. Allowing your team to score a touchdown late in the game when you are ahead is part of rewarding your walk-on players, your backup players who haven’t had a chance to play much.

At South Carolina the last few years, because most of our games were close, we weren’t able to get the guys in that much. But at Florida, our backup quarterback, Brock Berlin, threw a touchdown pass in each of the first seven games in 2001.

I’ve always believed you want to encourage your backups to give a good effort in a relief role, so sometimes that will result in tacking on touchdowns. I will admit there have been a few times when running up the score was meant to send a message. But mostly it’s giving your reserves a chance to show what they can do when they get their chance to play—and not just in a mop-up role.

Some of these so-called unwritten rules in the mythical coaching handbook are thinly disguised as Emily Post etiquette.

I want to score as much and as often as possible until our backup players are in the game. And if the shoe is on the other foot, I don’t mind the opposition doing the same thing. If coaches don’t like a lopsided score, then the best thing to do is stop the other team from scoring. The really good coaches never complain about the final score because their main focus is winning the game.

The first time I was ever accused of running up the score was when I was at Duke. We played Georgia Tech following a very, very tough loss at Maryland, where we blew a big lead. We had gone up and down the field and when we got inside the five-yard line we kept trying to run it in with two tight ends and two backs. And we had to kick a bunch of short field goals. This was purely my fault. We were up 22–7 in the fourth quarter and Maryland scored two touchdowns and tried two two-point conversions and, unbelievably, they made them both. And they beat us, 23–22.

So when the game was over I told our players, “Fellas, I’ll take full responsibility for this one. There was some dumb-ass play-calling down on the goal line and I guarantee you I’ll try my best to never do that again! From now on, when we get on the goal line, we may be in a spread formation. We’re not getting in any more two tight end formations. That’s history!”

The next week we played Georgia Tech—they came to Wallace Wade Stadium. In the fourth quarter with eight minutes left we learned that our quarterback, Steve Slayden, had tied the ACC record with five touchdown passes. We were sort of struggling that year with only three or four wins. So I said, “Steve, I’m going to give you a shot at the record, but you’ve got to do it in the normal course of the game. We’re not going to call time-out.” We had time for maybe one more drive. We got the ball at about our 20 and we go driving down the field and, sure enough, on second and eleven Steve hit the touchdown pass—a seam route to Bud Zuberer. And we ended up beating them 48–14 and Slayden set the ACC record.

Bobby Ross was the coach at Georgia Tech. He might have been a little upset, I don’t know. But a writer in Charlotte, North Carolina, named Tom Sorensen wrote an article saying, “Steve Spurrier of Duke ought to be ashamed for running up the score on Georgia Tech. With the game safely in hand and a minute fifty left, he threw another touchdown pass.”

Sorensen called Tom Butters, the AD at Duke, and asked him, “How do you feel about having a football coach who ran up the score last week against Georgia Tech? Do you believe in that?”

And Mr. Butters told him, “Let me tell you something. I’ve been the athletic director here for twenty-two years. And this is the first time anybody has accused my football coach of running up the score. And to tell you the truth, I sort of like it!”

So I encourage new, young head coaches to do it differently, whether it’s your style of coaching, talking, or what you choose to wear. Don’t be afraid to do your own thing.

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IT’S A NICE TRIBUTE when a coach comes up and says, “Coach Spurrier, I wear the visor because you wore one.” I’ve had Gus Malzahn of Auburn tell me that. Hugh Freeze, Ole Miss coach. Gary Andersen, formerly of Wisconsin and now of Oregon State, and Dan Mullen of Mississippi State.

When Coach Bobby Stoops came down to join us at Florida in 1995 before becoming head coach at Oklahoma, all of our staff was voluntarily wearing visors. Bobby said it made sense because they were a lot cooler to wear in the hot sun than hats. And then when Kevin Sumlin joined Bobby’s OU staff, he began wearing one—and still does as head coach at Texas A&M.

I was deeply honored when some of them—Coach Malzahn and Coach Stoops, as I remember—paid tribute to the HBC by going visorless in their games that followed my resignation. And I especially appreciated the gesture by South Carolina interim coach Shawn Elliott when he waved his visor at the camera before the Gamecocks took the field to play Vanderbilt.

What’s interesting is that the Visor Guys are usually offensive-minded coaches, with the exception of Coach Stoops.

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PEOPLE MAY HAVE this idea that I throw my visor a lot, but not so much the last few years. I will admit, however, that I’ve tossed a few. The first time I recall throwing my visor was in 1990, my third game ever as Gator coach. We had beaten Oklahoma State, 50–7, in our opener. And then we went to Alabama and beat them in a huge game, 17–13.

In our third game we played Furman, a small but good and tough opponent at that time. We’d just enjoyed two big wins in our start at Florida, but our guys were a bit down and we didn’t get them as ready for Furman as we should have.

Our defense played super and we ended up beating them 27–3. At one point, the ball was on Furman’s 15-yard line and we had the perfect play called—a corner route to the split end. Furman played man-to-man and the defensive back was playing hard inside. So it should have been a gimme touchdown. But our receiver ran a bad route. I watched in disgust as the pass fell incomplete. It really frustrated me. Our guys had run that play in practice numerous times. It should have been an easy touchdown, but we just didn’t execute the play correctly.

I took my visor off and fired it to the ground. And the camera got me as I did. And we had to settle for a field goal. It wasn’t because we won or lost or that I had a disagreement with an official. It was because we hadn’t done a good job as coaches of teaching that guy how to run that route. I was mad at the player, but even madder at myself.

After a couple more times, as I became more experienced as a visor-thrower, I also found out that firing a perfectly good new white visor to the ground causes a grass stain and can ruin it. Those stains are almost impossible to wash off. I made a note to myself: “I gotta quit doing that!” And so I didn’t do it as much. I started flipping the visor up in the air and catching it.

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AS FOR DOING things differently, one thing we all have in common as coaches is knowing the will to win trumps just about everything. I side with the experts who say success can be learned, taught, and adopted.

For coaches, it all starts with the commitment to becoming a winner. That means getting yourself and your team in order, to give fate a chance. And no matter your coaching style, timing is a key to being a winner. Most successful people are also in the right place at the right time. Coach Wooden of UCLA certainly was. And for me, that has also been the case. I have found the wisdom of Coach Wooden’s words most helpful throughout my years of coaching and have collected ideas from many books and articles in formulating my coaching philosophy. But for me, the heart of the matter started at home, where my father taught me the valuable lesson of why they have a scoreboard. TheXrs7Qsp1g6JmgkY6uRNQUxdGj3W0f9IiNN7E4sFfIUs6TBHlFmrUPNRNUvoAi