[JT Sneaks]

Thanks guys, i will try to post as much in here as I can to save research on so many games on everyone's part

Central Florida vs. South Carolina

South Carolina


Aug. 29, 2005
With just three days before the season opener Thursday night against UCF, the South Carolina Gamecock football squad worked out for a little over two hours on the Bluff Road practice fields Monday afternoon. The session was like a typical "Wednesday" practice for the Gamecocks. Here are head coach Steve Spurrier's comments following the practice:
"We're about 72 or 73 hours away from finally playing. It was a decent practice. Nothing too exciting happened today. We got some good work in. The weather's been very good the last few days - good and hot and no thunderstorms, so we've been in good shape.
"Usually you need to practice well to play well. We haven't practiced extremely sharp, but we'll play to our potential Thursday night.
"They don't want Sidney (Rice) to play yet. They're afraid if he gets hit on his finger again, it's not healed enough to play. He's very doubtful.
"(Blake Mitchell's) got a chance to really play well. He's got a lot of potential. He can make all the throws. He's just got to get comfortable and have some good things happen and we have to pass block well. Hopefully he can stay away from getting hit by blitzers and stay out of trouble. We'll try to help him as much as we can."
INJURY REPORT: O.J. Murdock remained out due to an illness. Jonathan Hannah was sidelined with a left ankle injury. Dakota Walker was on crutches after having an infection in his left knee. Eric Stroman (left elbow), Michael Flint (right hand), Sidney Rice (left little finger) and Jared Cook (foot) also were in yellow jerseys on Monday.


Is Spurrier’s toughness too much for the gamecocks?

Former players say Spurrier’s tough training hard to endure

By BOB GILLESPIE

Senior Writer

Eleven years later, Terry Dean says he has “nothing but positive memories” about his four seasons playing quarterback at Florida for Steve Spurrier. Memories such as beating Alabama 28-13 in the 1993 SEC Championship Game and throwing seven touchdowns against New Mexico State in 1994, the SEC record.
But the Naples, Fla., financial consultant admits his warm and fuzzy feelings about his college football career are, in part, the result of a highly selective memory.
“My dad has a CD of some old games, but I don’t remember some things. I guess I’ve just blanked them out.”
He says he has tried to forget the battles with Spurrier during those four years, and the pressures of always being in the spotlight — for good and bad — in Gainesville. Most of all, Dean prefers to forget the emotional roller coaster that finally derailed and crashed Oct. 15, 1994.
That day, the senior and early-season Heisman Trophy candidate threw four interceptions in a 36-33 loss to Auburn at Florida Field. It was the Gators’ only regular-season loss that season and their last home loss for five years, a string of 30 victories, none with Dean in charge of Florida’s offense.
When Dean went to the bench, replaced by sophomore Danny Wuerffel, he recalls telling his brother, a wide receiver, “I’m done. I’ll never play again.”
Says Dean: “He didn’t believe me. But I knew it.” The rest of his senior season, he threw 15 passes, none when it mattered.
A week before the Auburn game, Dean had played poorly in a 42-18 rout of LSU. He says Spurrier showed him film of mistake after mistake from the game, punctuated by sarcastic comments about his play.
Dean wondered if Spurrier tries to tear down his quarterbacks, Marine Corps-like, in order to rebuild them the way the coach wants. Spurrier says that’s not his method of coaching.
“But my experience, that (tearing down) happened to me,” Dean says. “I struggled with that. I got the X’s and O’s, but his style was not my way. We had a lot of arguments. We never got along the way I had envisioned.”
In the final weeks of 1994, Dean saw Wuerffel survive, even thrive, in the Spurrier crucible. “Danny and Shane (Matthews) were more accommodating to his style,” Dean says. “If you were able to sit and do what you were told, the way you were told, you could handle it. I wasn’t able to.”
Spurrier still doesn’t buy that. “When a guy plays poorly, he gets benched. Terry had a few good games here and there, then he sort of lost his confidence somewhere along the way.
“Maybe I yelled at him and he lost it. But he was losing it before I started yelling a lot.”
Former Gators quarterback John Reaves, a Florida assistant at the time, remembers Dean as “a natural talent. He could run, threw a beautiful ball, was smart. But he got all nervous and uptight.
“Other quarterbacks get nervous around (Spurrier), too. I think a lot of it is personality, how people get along.”
Or, in this case and in others, how they didn’t get along with the coach.
Dean’s story is perhaps the most dramatic, and personally tragic, but it hardly is the only case of coach-quarterback dysfunction during Spurrier’s 12 seasons at Florida.
Spurrier, who won the 1966 Heisman Trophy, is notoriously demanding of, and often brutally critical of, his proteges. Some players took the benchings and tongue-lashings as hard wisdom; others did not.
Nearly one-fourth of the quarterbacks who signed with Florida from 1990-2001 left the team, a number not significantly higher than at other schools. Others, like Dean and, later, Doug Johnson, stayed, if not always happily.
Some say they came away with bruised psyches and feelings ranging from bitter to bittersweet. Others, years removed from the collegiate pressure cooker, now grudgingly grant the then-devil, Spurrier, his due.
“I don’t wish I’d gone elsewhere,” says Johnson, who played at Florida from 1996-99 and ranks seventh in career passing yardage (7,114), fourth in career touchdowns (62) and is now a backup for the Cleveland Browns.
“I came out with the skills and knowledge that allowed me to make an NFL team my rookie year as a free agent, and that doesn’t happen without playing for (Spurrier).”
But Johnson also learned in his senior season of 1999 the price for not meeting Spurrier’s standards. The Gators, with a 9-1 record, lost to Florida State 30-23 in a game in which Johnson threw a pair of interceptions.
Three weeks later, vs. Alabama in the SEC Championship Game, he attempted two passes as Jesse Palmer took over.
“He takes great pride in that position (quarterback), because he was one,” Johnson says. “He takes (failure) personally. It’s a tough situation for a player. Playing quarterback for him is probably more demanding than anywhere else.”
For some, it was too demanding. Donald Douglas, who started the final four games and bowl game for Florida in 1989, before Spurrier arrived, transferred to Houston. Kyle Morris, another regular in 1989, left for Division II Mississippi College.
Later, Antwan Chiles (Liberty), Luke Bencie (Michigan State), Eric Kresser (Marshall), Bobby Sabelhaus (West Virginia, then San Jose State) and Tim Olmstead (Vanderbilt) also left — some angry, some relieved.
Sabelhaus, a Parade All-American, never took a college snap and eventually underwent treatment for bipolar disorder, which he later said was exacerbated by playing football. In a 2002 interview, he seemed to tie Spurrier to his failures.
“Everything I did was wrong,” Sabelhaus told The New Yorker. “I was used to coaches yelling at me, but they also would sometimes pat you on the back. Not Spurrier.
“He was constantly berating me. I would wake up in the morning and spend the entire day dreading the afternoon meeting. The other quarterbacks went through the same thing. (They) could take it. Not me.”
Spurrier, not speaking specifically about Sabelhaus, says the notion that quarterbacks were scared of him are attempts to justify failure.
“Well, that’s an excuse. If they were afraid of me, that was their excuse for it. I tried to coach them all pretty much the same, but some guys could do it the way you asked, and do it more consistently. Some could not.
“The ones who could not, you yelled at them a little bit more, until all of a sudden (he realized), ‘Maybe this guy can’t do it, and I’m barking up the wrong tree,’ because he’s not going to get any better. But some of those guys had a lot of ability.”
One who did was Spurrier’s first college quarterback, Duke’s Ben Bennett. The two had famously fractious battles.
“They both had strong egos. They were a lot alike, to be honest,” says Red Wilson, who hired Spurrier to be his offensive coordinator in 1980. “Ben would have the nerve to say, ‘Coach, I don’t like it.’ But like it or not, that’s what they were going to do.”
Bennett, now the coach of the AFL2 Manchester (N.H.) Wolves, eventually became a convert, but the process wasn’t painless.
“I’d called all my own plays in high school and had tremendous success,” Bennett says. “I felt I knew all there was to know.
“It took me three weeks of preseason to learn I didn’t know everything — but Steve did.”
In a game vs. Wake Forest in Bennett’s freshman season, Spurrier started Ron Sally at quarterback, “to show Ben he couldn’t run the team,” Wilson says. When the Blue Devils faltered, a motivated Bennett came on to throw for 469 yards.
Bennett says now that Spurrier disliked his clothes, his hair and even his car, a Corvette T-top, but mostly his attitude. “He was trying to make me more of a team player, not alter me as a person. That caused some friction, until I realized he was right.”
Johnson also came to understand Spurrier’s methods, sort of. After signing with Florida, he signed a $450,000 contract with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. That, and shoulder and leg injuries, led Spurrier to question Johnson’s commitment to football.
Then, before his senior season, Spurrier made it clear to Johnson that if he wanted to play, he needed to stay in Gainesville and work out that summer.
“I made that decision,” says Johnson, who turned his back on baseball. “That’s why I’m in the NFL now.”
But if Johnson learned lessons from Spurrier that served him well in the pros, he says they came at the expense of what he would have liked as a college player.
“Bottom line, he was strictly business,” Johnson says. “Coach doesn’t care about your personal life. He’s not concerned with things off the field.
“In my opinion, and I’m a parent now, when you have an 18-year-old kid (playing football), you need to be a little more concerned with him as a human being. You need someone you can talk to about life and have a personal relationship with. That wasn’t there with Spurrier.
“If you go to play for him, you’re going to a guy who’ll make you the best quarterback you can be, and that’s it. Don’t expect more. It’s a business relationship. He’s there to win games.”