Steve Spurrier

Stephen Orr Spurrier (born April 20, 1945) is an American retired football coach and player, who is also commonly referred to by his nicknames, the Head Ball Coach or the ol' Ball Coach. Spurrier was a college football quarterback with the Florida Gators, where he won the 1966 Heisman Trophy. The San Francisco 49ers selected him in the first round of the 1967 NFL draft, and he spent a decade playing in the National Football League (NFL) mainly as a backup quarterback and punter. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a player in 1986.

Spurrier went into coaching in 1978 and spent five years as a college assistant for the Florida Gators, the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, and the Duke Blue Devils where he began to develop his innovative offensive system while serving as the Blue Devils offensive coordinator in the early 1980s. He was hired to his first head coaching job by the Tampa Bay Bandits of the United States Football League (USFL) in 1983 and led the team to two playoff appearances in three seasons before the league folded. Spurrier returned to the college ranks in 1987, serving as the head football coach at Duke (three seasons), Florida (12 seasons), and South Carolina (10.5 seasons), amassing 228 total wins and a 72% career winning percentage. Between his stints at Florida and South Carolina, he led the Washington Redskins of the NFL for two seasons with less success. Spurrier retired from coaching in 2015 and became an ambassador and consultant for the University of Florida's athletic department, though he briefly returned to the sidelines to coach the Orlando Apollos of the short-lived Alliance of American Football in 2019.

Spurrier's teams were known for winning with aggressive and high-scoring offenses, and he became known for teasing and "needling" rivals both before and after beating them on the field. Spurrier's 1989 Duke squad won the program's only Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) championship between 1963 and 2025. He is the winningest coach in both Florida and South Carolina program history, making him the only coach to hold the record for most wins at two different Southeastern Conference (SEC) schools, and Florida's streak of four consecutive SEC championships in the mid-1990s is the second-longest in conference history. When Florida quarterback Danny Wuerffel won the Heisman Trophy during the Gators' 1996 national championship season, Spurrier became the only Heisman Trophy winner to coach another Heisman Trophy winner. In 2017, he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach, making him one of four members to be honored for both his playing and coaching careers.

In recognition to his contributions to the university and its football program, the University of Florida officially renamed the Gators home field "Steve Spurrier-Florida Field at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium" in 2016.