Mike Celizic

With Steve Spurrier going to South Carolina, it’s great news for NFL fans, who won’t have to worry about him showing up on their team’s sideline.

Whether South Carolina fans can start celebrating and SEC fans worrying is another matter. Quite frankly, Spurrier has to prove that he can still coach at the highest levels.

There aren’t many major state universities — Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, is another — that have had as lackluster a football history as South Carolina. In its history, the school has won one conference title and three bowl games — two under Lou Holtz and the other in 1994. It’s been to only 11 bowl games.

Holtz brought pride and aspiration to the program. Under his watch, attendance has been at an all-time high, bowl appearances have been the rule rather than the exception, and the Gamecocks have appeared on national television more often. Twice, he’s finished the season ranked in the Top 25, and no South Carolina team had ever been nationally ranked at the end of the season before he got there.

It’s hard to argue with Holtz’ accomplishments. He put the program on the map, established credibility, turned a habitual loser into a school that has begun to dare to dream about competing for a national championship. He has a knack for that, a rare one among football coaches. It doesn’t matter where he goes, he always makes a program better — a lot better.

But Holtz has retired. And in his five years at South Carolina, he wasn't able to take the program to the elite level.

Spurrier's hiring is the best news that ever hit the campus, if it’s the same Steve Spurrier who won 120 games and a national championship in 12 years at Florida. Or, it could be a return to college football’s anonymous netherworld if it’s the Spurrier who went 12-20 in two years with the Washington Redskins.

Remember, a lot of people thought that Spurrier would be a great NFL coach. They hoped his pass-happy style of play would fly in the pros. He wasn’t and it didn’t. The quarterbacks he had turned into Heisman candidates at Florida couldn’t hack it with the big boys. His razzle-dazzle offense was a bigger bust than “Ishtar.”

It turned out that Spurrier didn’t have the mentality to coach in the pros. Oddly enough, he didn’t take the game seriously enough, didn’t want to put in the time, couldn’t motivate the troops, was incapable of seeing what he needed to succeed. After just two years, he was glad to get out.

If you’re a South Carolina fan, you have to wonder if he still has what it takes to coach on a college level. You have to wonder if he still cares enough to get the job done.

College coaching isn’t as labor-intensive as the pro variety. An NFL job has no real breaks. You go from the season to free agent moves to salary cap calculations to the draft to mini-camps to summer camp to exhibitions to the regular season. The college job has the recruiting season, but the assistants do the heavy lifting there, with the head coach coming in to seal the deal on the blue-chip prospects. There’s a real offseason when a head coach can tour the country collecting money on the speaking circuit and play golf or go fishing.

Spurrier likes playing golf (an Augusta National membership reportedly is in the works). He likes his free time. At Florida, he built a program that became somewhat self-sustaining. He didn’t have to fight as hard for recruits; plenty of the best players wanted to play for him at Florida. He had good assistants and a system that worked in college.

It will be more labor-intensive at first. Holtz has laid the groundwork, but it’s still not a program that most top 10 recruits would put near the top of their wish list of places to play.

So Spurrier will have to be very involved in the recruiting process. He’s going to have to reassemble a staff that can teach the football that won at Florida. He’s going to have to put more into the job at first than he used to have to put in at Florida.

Does he want to do that? Can he have the same success with a slightly lower talent level? Can he get the right assistants? Will he have the enthusiasm?

Most of all, how badly does he want to return to the top? In Washington, the answer was not very. What will it be in South Carolina?

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