Steve was considered by many to be the "heir apparent" to Coach Bryant in the late 70s.

He led Vanderbilt to 5-6 and 7-3-2 records in 1973 and 1974; 1974 was the 2nd bowl game in their history. (Under Dan McGugin, Vandy was great from 1902-1927 losing 1 or 0 games in 16 of those 26 seasons. Then UT hired Neyland to "beat Vanderbilt", who continued to be good, but not as good. UT who had been 2-2-18 all-time vs VU, went 17-2-2 under Neyland.)

Steve then went to Texas Tech and won 10 games in 1976, leading them to the 2nd highest in-season ranking in their history til this day, a ranking of number 5, ending at number 13; the 4th time they had finished a season ranked at all in the 40 year history of the AP at that time. They've never ended up ranked higher than 11th.

He was the hottest young coach in the country. He then went to Ole Miss in 1978 and his career bombed. One reason was that he had a hard time recruiting because everyone knew Coach Bryant would be retiring soon and it was assumed that Steve would succeed him. He never recovered.

Bill Parcels was Steve's DC at Vanderbilt and Texas Tech. People thought it was a pipe dream when Parcells privately expressed interest in the Alabama job when Mike Price was fired but because he was out of work and had coached for Sloan and Ray Perkins and respected them both tremendously, he was interested. Though it is hard to gauge how serious he really was. Mal did not want to go in that direction or with Tom Coughlin who expressed publicly his interest in the job. He had just been fired from Jacksonville prior to going to the Giants. The ptb wanted a "Bama" guy who would stay on the job to build the program back up. Mal wanted Richard Williamson who would have done a much better job than Croom or Shula, neither of whom were ready to coach at the SEC level. But Mal was overruled by others and chose Shula, primarily because of Ray Perkin's recommendation. Thankfully, the hard-nosed Perkins also advised Shula to be firm with Mal about his assistant coaches, causing Coach Moore to reluctantly fire him and bring in Coach Saban. That was about the best thing post-playing Perkins ever did for Alabama. Though to be fair he did support the program and tried to help, he just did not have good judgment.