Earlier today, I wrote a general piece on the larger topic of quitting, in sports and various other theaters of life. The article was not a verdict on the subject so much as a series of questions meant to create a fresh discussion of the issue and its tension points.
The act of quitting is, in most cases, indisputable. The question I asked from various angles in that piece was, essentially, “What does or doesn’t make quitting a negative and unacceptable thing?”
This piece will tackle that question in the specific case of Steve Spurrier, who plainly quit in the middle of South Carolina’s 2015 football season. Was this a “good quit,” or is Spurrier a “quitter,” with all the baggage and disapproval the term commonly carries?
Let’s dive into this scenario, shall we?
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College sports are, of course, immediately different from pro sports in that recruiting is a constant concern. Players won’t stick around longer than four years (barring redshirts and/or injuries, etc.), so the need to constantly replenish a roster with top-tier talent is essential. You get that. Everyone gets that.
The more specific concern with recruiting, then, is not just getting players into a program, but keeping them happy — first because transfers have become more frequent and a more commonplace way for coaches to enhance their teams. Player A is unhappy at one school? Boom! He can transfer to another one. Instant upgrade for Coach C, instant downgrade for Coach B.
Recruits are also valuable for this reason: If they have a really good reputation in a community, especially at their high school (which might be a powerhouse in a given sport), they can convince subsequent graduating high school athletes to follow them to University D. This can solidify a pipeline and give University D the foothold in recruiting it needs to be successful over a longer period of time. If the coaches of really strong and important high school programs in states — such as South Carolina — see that their players are having a positive experience as freshmen, that furthers the whole operation for the university’s football program.
This is not a concern of NFL coaches.
If a college program’s situation breaks down in terms of recruiting, and, oh, I don’t know, the coach in question is 70 years old and made a remark a while back that he wanted to coach for only two to three years, but then had to walk back that statement and revise it to four or five years, eventually feeling so worried that he doubled down on that statement by essentially repeating it this past summer in a hastily-called press conference…
… well…
… you can put two and two together.
It’s a mess.
Need proof that the South Carolina program was disintegrating in the midst of an untenable situation?
Read the article linked to in the tweet below:
Things look to be getting tense between a pair #Gamecocks on Twitter http://t.co/YeaDj3DgPA pic.twitter.com/HYByVnMFSx
— Garnet and Black Attack (@GABAttack) October 11, 2015
Point-blank: The people who were surprised by this abrupt resignation/retirement:
1) Didn’t really study Steve Spurrier that closely.
They should have known he always operated by his own lights and didn’t follow widely-held conventions. Most of all, they should have remembered that he wanted just two or three more seasons in the first place; he was too candid (as has been the case in many other instances over the years), and never should have made that remark. It was that remark which led to this abrupt downturn. Had he kept his mouth shut, chances are this situation wouldn’t exist to the extent that it does. It is therefore not a deep structural problem, but a temporary problem, at South Carolina… which leads us to the next point:
2) People surprised by Spurrier’s abrupt retirement overlooked the centrality of Spurrier’s age (attached to his unwise two-or-three-year remark) and its relationship to recruiting, which is what enabled the Gamecocks to win the SEC East and then 11 games in three straight seasons.
When Marcus Lattimore and Jadeveon Clowney came to the program, South Carolina entered a new world of possibility. In light of the Twitter fight between players above and everything else which was happening inside the program — industry insiders viewed it as a program which was rapidly declining — did Spurrier really have much of a choice… IF, of course, he had the best interests of the South Carolina program in mind?
That answer should be painfully clear.
The only real question here is whether Spurrier should have announced his retirement effective at the end of the regular season but continued in a lame-duck capacity. That seems like an issue in which it’s not absolutely essential to stay on, but noble to a certain extent. However, when you consider Spurrier’s mindset as one of the most competitive people in American sports, would he ever want to do things half-baked? For him, coaching as a lame duck would not have a larger competitive goal in mind. It would be playing — or rather, coaching — out the string.
Quitting — which Spurrier in fact did — doesn’t seem nearly as negative or as unwise when filtered through that lens.
Quitting, sometimes, can be the responsible thing to do. It’s certainly more true of college coaches than NFL coaches, given the importance of recruiting. Quitting as an NFL coach doesn’t jeopardize the next pick in the following spring’s draft. In college, it’s a very different story.
Quitting — we think of it as a negative. We as Americans have been conditioned to think that way.
Yet, it’s hard to look at South Carolina’s (temporarily) deteriorating situation and conclude that Steve Spurrier’s abrupt move was anything other than highly beneficial for the program’s future. This move has given the Gamecocks and their administrators a chance to plan ahead, and not make rash decisions.
It seems Spurrier is a lot wiser than the people who can’t get past the familiar and pejorative connotation of the word “quit.”
I think we should quit assigning a negative connotation to the word “quit” in a reflexive, knee-jerk way.
I think we should quit burying “quitters” with automatic, machine-gun assumptions and interpretations, instead looking at all the details of a situation before rendering a verdict on a given instance of quitting.
After 1,038 words, I think it’s time to quit writing this column, because I’ve said all that needs to be said.
