Only thing holding back USC is recruiting. Spurrier was never the UF Spurrier of olden days: in the first half of his tenure at USC, the Gamecocks had atrocious offenses at times, but the defenses were the most consistent performing units of the program. Spurrier had nothing to do with that - hell, USC had those defenses under John Thompson, Tyrone Nix, and Ellis Johnson. Where are they all now?

Then Spurrier was introduced to the zone read offense, particularly in 2010. He brought in Lattimore and Shaw who thrived in the zone read. Spurrier never coached zone read offenses at UF: it wasn't his offense. But the team had their best years in the system.

Then there was the recruiting: SC as a state had some excellent prep talent rise up during those latter years, and Spurrier's staff did an excellent job of corralling the vast majority of them. The staff had brought in a top 10 class in 2007 and another one just outside of the top 10 in 2009, but those classes didn't produce anything beyond the 7-6 type seasons Spurrier was realizing.

Then the top in-state talent surge, mostly on the defensive side, keeping the defenses stellar, and the zone read clicked into place, and boom we pulled off several 11-win seasons.

IMO, after the first one in 2011, Spurrier started looking towards the sunset. Johnson left to take over SoMiss, and Ward who was a solid recruiter, couldn't focus as hard when he was promoted to DC. Lawing got run out of Columbia, and he was a solid DL developer. He was replaced by a joke of a teaching coach, IMO. Beamer left to join his dad's staff at VT, and Bubba was a lousy RC in his place. And the level of prep talent in SC fell off after Clowney...

It's the story of a staff that takes a long time to build a program, but does so and then rides the talent to a few great seasons until they all matriculate out of the program, and then the staff kinda walks off out of the center view.

They never tried all that hard to keep it going - probably because Spurrier was old after all and when he started talking about calling it quits, the staff saw the writing on the wall and started quitting too.

It will forever grind my teeth that ANY staff of a SEC program - regardless how new or laughable or incompetent they may be perceived - would NEVER have allowed a program to build up to a top 10 national, 11-win a year program, without breaking their necks and backs to capitalize on the success and try to take the program all the way. But Spurrier and his staff got USC there, and they called it quits. Probably why most of the staff now has hard times finding jobs at Div. III programs these days..

This post was edited on 8/23/17 at 3:25 pm