So it turns out the Head Ball Coach, who perhaps tortured LSU fans more than any other cackling villain, finishes his career with a “home” loss in a half-full Tiger Stadium, in broad daylight, a little more than three hours after Tigers fans cheered his very image on their own jumbo screen.

That right there should have told you that the end — of Spurrier, perhaps, but also of this earth? — was near at hand.

But, please, please say this zinger just ain’t so. Please tell me the Southeastern Conference is not losing Steve Spurrier.

Sorry, it just won’t be the same.

Maybe it was coincidence that Spurrier hung it up after a loss to LSU, but it seems fitting. Darth Visor seemingly had LSU about ready to quit football for much of the 1990s.

But the coach who infuriated LSU all those years stepped down having never beaten Les Miles in four tries (the Tigers’ previous four coaches went 1-11 against the HBC).

Miles had the good fortune of catching Spurrier at South Carolina.

Best known for having to educate Stepford Wives Gamecocks fans to occasionally be demanding enough to get mad at their own team, what he did there might have been more impressive than the Fun-N’-Gun days while unleashing the Florida Gators on the world.

Some LSU fans will tell you the highlight of the 2007 national championship season was the “gotcha” moment in Tiger Stadium, on otherwise nondescript game when Miles pulled a fast one on South Carolina with Matt Flynn’s over-the-shoulder toss on a fake field goal.

The “touché” look on Spurrier’s face was worth the price of admission for LSU. Oh, he could take it.

But, gosh, could he dish it out.

On the other hand, it never looked quite right watching him at South Carolina, winning mostly with defense and ball control.

That’s why it’s more fun to remember the HBC at Florida.

LSU fans might remember a similarly empty Tiger Stadium, but for totally different reasons, in 1993, at the tail end of Spurrier’s 58-3 victory over the Tigers.

Spurrier never minded, with his own not-so-subtle digs, of reminding LSU fans that they could have had him, pretty cheap, in 1987, when he interviewed for the job that eventually went to Mike Archer.

That’s probably overrated, or it would have been temporary at best. Spurrier was going to end up at Florida one way or the other.

What took his alma mater so long is not so much anybody’s guess as one of the great mysteries of our age.

At least LSU had the excuse of politics getting in the way.

But if you ask me, Spurrier at Florida had as much as anybody to do with transforming the SEC into the most powerful, most destructive force college football has ever seen.

It became a matter of survival.

The SEC had long had the speed.

But a fat lot of good it was doing them when they were all obsessed with the ground game, ball control and that favorite four-letter word of Curley Hallman’s — Field Po Si Tion.

Spurrier was a shock to the SEC’s system because he admittedly loved him some offense.

He also didn’t cheat, which was quite a shock to Florida’s system at the time.

Spurrier brought this odd notion that football ought to be fun and that if you didn’t want him exploding your scoreboard, you had best be stopping his ball plays because he sure as the devil wasn’t pulling back on the reins.

Shoot, man, you only got 60 minutes, might as well use all of them.

Almost 100 years of history had taught a long line of SEC coaches that you win championships with defense and occasionally with special teams and often as not by running the football better than the next guy.

In the new SEC, ruled by a fickle, fearless Visor who liked to show off like a pool shark trick-shot artist, that old bromide turned out to be so much hogwash.

All that kind of stuff got you in Spurrier’s world was the very real possibility that you might get lapped by the Gators before halftime, which tended to rile up the alumni and get a moving van sent to your gated neighborhood.

They gave it the old college try, so to speak. Opposing coaches first response was to stay up late ­­— Spurrier might be sneaking in a quick nine after practice ­—and devise new defenses that surely, if practiced enough and if it could just eliminate the mistakes that 20-year-olds sometimes make, might be enough to stop the mad genius.

But Florida adopted Spurrier’s attitude as much as his ball plays.

They were almost always the most penalized team in the SEC, but it didn’t matter.

Two straight holding penalties? The famed visor might take brief flight. But then the HBC would gather himself, smirk a little bit, lick his fingers and smirk one more time, to the point you could almost see those devilish gears turning in that evil mind.

Third-and-32? Think I can’t? Yeah, I think I got a ball play for that. Hey, guys, let’s see how they like this one. It might be fun.

It drove the rest of the SEC stark-raving crazy.

So the SEC was almost forced to transform itself from the bare-knuckles, in-the-trenches brawling old-school conference into the sleekest, high-powered, offensive-minded, go-deep collection of race horses the NCAA had ever seen.

All just to keep up.

l

Scooter Hobbs covers LSU

athletics. Email him at

shobbs@americanpress.com

(Associated Press)

Richard Shiro