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I get that. But if Spurrier is as great as people make him out to be, he should have been able to overcome that and get closer to taking USC to a championship than getting his arse handed to him by Gene Chizik.

Coulda, woulda, shoulda. Granted, we're talking largely in hypotheticals here, but I think you -- as most people do in certain situations, including me -- judge him by far too high a standard. He's not one of the greats because he failed to take a perennial loser like USC to the mountaintop? If that's the standard, then we'd be in very short supply of truly great coaches. It's like the LSU and Auburn fans deriding Saban because he hasn't been at the absolute pinnacle his entire career. That sort of thing simply reeks of irrational standards, usually in service of an agenda (not saying you have one, though the aforementioned LSU and Auburn fans certainly do.) Spurrier career accomplishments speak for themselves, including revolutionizing offense in the '90s, and dominating a conference that, while it might not have been as strong as it's been the last 8 years or so, certainly wasn't a pushover. The last 8 years have been a genuinely historic run, so comparing the two isn't quite fair. In the same vein, the SEC-E might have been the weaker of the two in the last 5 years or so, but it was still stronger than the stronger divisions of other conferences (to put it in perspective, Clemson, winner of 10+ games three years in a row, is also the loser of the USC/Clemson game three years in a row. More than that, actually, but I'm using their recent success to make my point.) And Spurrier also managed to take fricking Duke out of their doldrums better than any coach except Cutcliffe.

Look, I agree the game has passed Spurrier by to some extent, but we're talking overall quality, right? Saban is the only coach currently in the SEC who, imho, can legitimately claim to be clearly better than Spurrier in a historically-strong league. Nobody's arguing that Spurrier is the greatest of all time, but categorically omitting him from the discussion of a list of greats makes little sense to me in light of his career.