Spurrier almost ended up at the real Carolina
By: Staff Report July 23, 2021

Former South Carolina and Florida head coach Steve Spurrier was inducted into the South Carolina Football Hall of Fame on Thursday.

During his speech, Spurrier shared a funny story of how he ended up taking the South Carolina job when he decided to get back into coaching in 2005 following a stint with the Washington Redskins from 2002-03.

It sounds like Spurrier’s wife would have rather seen him get the North Carolina job, but it didn’t work out that way.

Here’s the story, courtesy of Mike Gillespie of ABC Columbia.

“Our path was directed here to South Carolina,” Spurrier said. “Somebody said, ‘How did you end up getting the job?’ And I said, well, (former South Carolina athletic director) Mike McGee called me up and said, ‘Are you interested in coaching again?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ Now, I’m going to be 60 years old the next year, and I don’t know if people thought that was old for a coach back then. It’s not very old now, we all know that. But anyway, I said, ‘Yeah, I want to.’

“And in the meantime, a booster from North Carolina called up and said, ‘Are you interested if the job opens?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I want to coach again.’ So anyway, Coach McGee comes up again and offers me the job. So I went to my wife, Jerri, and I said, ‘Let’s go to South Carolina and see if we can do some things that have never been done before.’ And the first thing she said was, ‘What happened to North Carolina?’ I said, ‘That job didn’t open up, Jerri.’

“What happened, the North Carolina field goal guy made a 55-yarder against Miami, and they kept the coach for another year. At that time, that job might’ve been a little more attractive than South Carolina. But we beat them every time we played them, by the way, during my time at South Carolina.”