After Steve Spurrier announced his resignation as football coach of the Florida Gators in 2002, he offered a voice of reassurance to those who watched him lead a program into prominence.
“I am a Gator,” he said, “and will be for the rest of my life.”
Spurrier was the first Gator to win a Heisman Trophy, the first Gator coach to win an SEC title and the first coach to escort Florida to a national title.
He was the one who initially pegged Ben Hill Griffin Stadium as “The Swamp” in the early 1990s.
And on Saturday afternoon, when he returns to his former home, he will walk past a bronze statue of his 1966 Heisman Trophy-winning self, throwing arm cocked back and an “F” on the side of his helmet, for he remains a fixture in Florida football history.
But this time when he visits his alma mater, he'll do so clad in garnet and black.
“As far as me going down there again,” Spurrier said, “I’ll look around the stadium during warmups, and then when the game starts, hopefully [we’ll] get the plays in there, get the defense and special teams guys ready to go and try to do whatever I can to help us win the game.”
Saturday will mark the fifth time Spurrier has coached against the Gators in The Swamp, winning only once. That win came in 2010 when the Gamecocks clinched the SEC East with a 36-14 win. Running back Marcus Lattimore was a true freshman and rushed for 212 yards in the victory.
This time is different.
The underachieving Gamecocks need two wins in their final three games just to be bowl eligible, something they've accomplished every year so far under Spurrier.
And with a struggling defense set to face freshman quarterback Treon Harris and a surging Gators offense, limiting big plays has become a focal point for South Carolina this week in practice.
Florida seems to have found a spark in Harris, igniting a once-struggling offense. Despite passing for only 27 yards in a win against Georgia two weeks ago, Harris has led Florida to back-to-back wins, something the Gamecocks haven't been able to do since September.
Harris racked up 264 yards of total offense against Vanderbilt last week and also rushed for two scores.
As poorly as South Carolina has performed as a collective unit this season, it’s hard to pin much of that on the team’s offense. Statistically, the Gamecocks have been stellar on that side of the ball.
Sophomore wide receiver Pharoh Cooper is second in the SEC in receiving yards, coming off a school-record 233-yard explosion through the air against Tennessee. On top of this, the only player in the conference who has passed for more yards than redshirt senior Dylan Thompson is Texas A&M's Kenny Hill. Thompson will likely surpass Hill as the SEC’s leading passer after this game, as Hill has since been benched for freshman Kyle Allen.
But even though South Carolina’s offense has been able to keep the team in most games this season, assistant coach Steve Spurrier Jr. doesn't want that to be the team’s mentality going into Saturday’s game.
“It’s a team sport. At the end of the day, we’re all one team. We all know that,” he said. “You win together, and you lose together. Some people get more attention than others, and certainly we’ve had a lot of that too, but at the end of the day, we’re all together."