Taylor, who played for Florida football from 1994-1997, was a key piece of the Gators’ national championship team in 1996 under legendary head coach Steve Spurrier.
Taylor was selected by the Jacksonville Jaguars with the ninth overall pick in the 1998 NFL Draft and he didn’t waste any time making an impact.
Taylor was placed on the PFWA All-Rookie team after racking up over 1,200 rushing yards and 17 total touchdowns. Over the course of his career, Taylor rushed for 11,695 yards, placing him 17th on the NFL’s all-time rushing list at the time of his retirement in 2011.
Taylor coined the nickname “Fragile Fred” because of his durability concerns early in his career, but he later silenced those doubts with his consistent production.
What’s next?
Taylor is among 25 semifinalists for the 2025 Hall of Fame class. The list will be narrowed down to finalists in the beginning of 2025, with the official inductees announced shortly after.
If chosen, Taylor would join fellow Florida legends Emmitt Smith and Jack Youngblood in Canton, Ohio, proudly representing the Gators in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
For now, Taylor’s name remains in the conversation. But his contributions to the sport of football have earned him a rightful place in the Hall of Fame discussion.
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ESPN announced on Friday that ACC Network would broadcast live from the Duke University campus before Saturday’s game against SMU.
The Duke Blue Devils and SMU Mustangs battle at Wallace Wade Stadium on Saturday with a combined record of 12-2, a game that should radically change the race to Charlotte for the conference championship game. So, of course, ACC Network plans to give the game its full attention.
ESPN announced on Friday that ACC Huddle, an ACC Network studio show, would be in Durham for its Week 9 coverage.
According to a social media post about the schedule, first-year Duke head coach [autotag]Manny Diaz[/autotag] would appear on the show. Steve Spurrier, one of three former Blue Devils coaches who will be at Saturday’s game, is also on the schedule.
The Blue Devils and Mustangs both introduce some unforeseen variance for the conference pecking order. SMU won 11 games last year, but it did so as a member of the American Athletic Conference, so questions remained about whether head coach Rhett Lashlee could win at the Power Four level. So, naturally, SMU is riding a four-game win streak and scoring more than 40 points per game this season.
Duke won 17 games under former coach Mike Elko in 2022-23, but expectations hovered around six wins in the first year of the Diaz era after losing more than a half-dozen starters to the NFL and the transfer portal. Instead, the defense sits fourth in the FBS in yards allowed per play (4.29) and per pass attempt (4.9).
📢 @accnetwork's studio shows head to Durham, N.C. for surrounding coverage of ACC Primetime Football
🏈 Fri | 4p ET | ACC PM 🏈 Sat | 11a ET | ACC Huddle 🏈 Sat | 8p ET | No. 22 @SMUFB at @DukeFOOTBALL
Duke football announced on Thursday that Steve Spurrier, David Cutcliffe, and Fred Goldsmith will be at Wallace Wade Stadium on Saturday.
Three essential coaches to Duke football history will be at Wallace Wade Stadium on Saturday night as the Blue Devils try to upset a ranked SMU team.
The team announced on Thursday that Steve Spurrier, David Cutcliffe, and Fred Goldsmith would all be in Durham this weekend as Duke honors the 1989, 1994, and 2014 teams for their 35th, 30th, and 10th anniversaries.
Spurrier, who eventually left Duke to become a national champion with the Florida Gators, only spent three seasons as the coach. He won 20 of his 34 games (and tied another), peaking with an eight-win 1989 season in his last year on the job.
Goldsmith, the last Duke football coach to win his first five games before Manny Diaz did so this season, won his first six games when he took over the program in 1994. He ended that season with an 8-4 record and coached the Blue Devils until 1998.
Cutcliffe spent 174 games on the sidelines in Durham, the most of any coach in program history. He finished with six bowl appearances in 14 seasons and ended his tenure with a 77-97 record, but a 5-18 mark over his final two seasons dampened his body of work.
The Blue Devils finished the 2014 season with a 9-4 record, part of a 2013-18 stretch that included five seven-win seasons.
With six wins already to his credit for the 2024 season, Diaz has five games left to make his first season as iconic as the ones mentioned above. A ranked win over SMU would be a great starting point.
Former Florida football head coach and Heisman Trophy winner Steve Spurrier thinks USC is unlucky, and that its DBs need to challenge passes better.
You find things when you’re surfing the internet.
While looking at X (the site formerly known as Twitter) on Monday night, I happened to come across a podcast from former Gainesville Sun sportswriter Pat Dooley. Dooley’s podcast included a segment with legendary college football head coach Steve Spurrier, the most famous figure in the history of Florida football.
Spurrier is the only man to win the Heisman Trophy as a player and then coach a Heisman Trophy winner at the same school. Spurrier won the Heisman for Florida in 1966. Thirty years later, in 1996, he coached quarterback Danny Wuerffel to the Heisman.
Spurrier won the 1996 national championship, six SEC championships and numerous New Year’s Day (BCS, now called New Year’s Six) bowl victories. He is one of the great coaches in SEC and college football history.
On his most recent podcast appearance with Dooley, Spurrier called USC one of the most snake-bitten teams in the country, given the Trojans’ very close losses, including the recent defeat to Penn State.
Spurrier added that on Penn State’s long touchdown pass to Tyler Warren in the third quarter, the defensive back just didn’t go up for the football and challenge the play. USC defensive backs have failed to make a number of plays like that this season.
It’s bad enough that USC is losing. It’s worse that a Hall of Fame coach is paying attention and noting the flaws in how the Trojans play football.
Georgia fans have to almost feel bad for former Florida head coach Steve Spurrier and Gator fans
College football analyst and former Florida Gators head coach Urban Meyer shared on “The Triple Option” podcast a fact that many Georgia Bulldogs fans would love to hear about former Florida head coach Steve Spurrier.
“I said ‘were you in the game’ and he (Steve Spurrier) said he left, you know, ‘to beat the traffic’ but he said ‘it was bad,'” said Urban Meyer.
It is hard to blame Spurrier or any other Florida fans for leaving the Gators’ 33-20 loss to the Texas A&M Aggies. Florida trailed 20-0 at halftime and 33-6 late in the third quarter. Florida is an abysmal 11-26 against Power Five opponents since the Gators’ infamous shoe throw against LSU.
Many Florida fans and alumni are starting to turn on their current head coach, Billy Napier. Things have turned sour in Gainesville. Miami absolutely demolished Florida in the Swamp in Week 1.
Billy Napier’s seat is red hot right now. Things aren’t getting any easier for the Gators. Florida faces the nation’s hardest schedule and would be doing well to make a bowl game at this point.
“I mean, I’m getting a little bit stressed out here thinking about what’s happening there,” said Meyer. “Because the momentum is gone. It’s been gone for a while there and that’s hard to imagine.”
The Gators are unlikely to meet Steve Spurrier’s modest expectations for the season. “I picked them to go 8-4 and win a bowl game, and if we do that, we can do cartwheels and somersaults around here,” said Spurrier before the season. “We’ll be a happy bunch of Gators.”
Right now, one thing is for sure. Florida fans aren’t a happy bunch of Gators.
Billy Napier’s seat is as hot as it can possibly get, but former Florida head coach Steve Spurrier is calling for patience among the fan base.
The Florida fan base and boosters are ready to move on from head coach [autotag]Billy Napier[/autotag], but there’s still a legendary Gator in his corner.
On the most recent episode of Another Dooley Noted Podcast with Pat Dooley, former Florida head coach [autotag]Steve Spurrier[/autotag] said that “we need to show a little patience” with Napier heading into a Week 4 road matchup with Mississippi State.
“It’s a crucial game this week,” Spurrier said to Dooley. “A crucial game maybe for the direction of the season. I still think you give Napier — they gave him what, a seven-year contract? Might as well give him three, if you can. But there’s going to have to be some decisions on how we finish record-wise.”
Spurrier isn’t saying fans should avoid criticism. He hinted at the university moving on from Napier at the end of that quote. But he also knows that firing the man up top doesn’t erase any systemic problem throughout the program. There’s also no sense in buying a coach out this early in the year.
“Everybody is under contract. Let them earn their pay,” he said. “And keep ’em all here and let’s go. See if they can turn it around. … I mean, all the coaches are going to be there even if the head coach isn’t so I don’t see how it’s going to make a huge difference if they remove the head coach. You might as well let the staff stay in place for a while and see what happens.”
Napier is 12-16 at Florida through two full seasons and three weeks of the 2024 season. Experts predicted a five-win ceiling for the Gators coming into the year, and the number is still achievable, albeit unlikely.
Both of Florida’s losses at home this year come against teams ranked inside the top 25 nationally. Miami looks like the ACC favorite and Texas A&M might be a decent team despite a loss to Notre Dame in Week 1. An attitude adjustment appeared to benefit the Aggies last week. Perhaps the Gators need a similar change to find success in the SEC.
“Teams can change,” Spurrier said. “One guy named William James said the greatest discovery of our generation is that a person or a company or a team can alter their life with a change in attitude, and we need a change in attitude. I’ve had teams that started pretty lousy and they got a change in attitude and had winning seasons.”
It’s going to be a big week for both Florida and Napier at Mississippi State. A win against Samford sent a small jolt of positivity throughout the fan base. Imagine what beating an SEC team would do for the team’s confidence.
Alternatively, a loss might send ditch diggers to the local cemetery in preparation for the end of the Billy Napier era.
Up next for the Gators
Florida will play their first road game of the season as they travel up to Starkville to play against the Mississippi State Bulldogs on Saturday, Sept. 21. Kickoff is set for noon ET and will be broadcast on ESPN.
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With Saturday night’s 26-21 comeback win over Connecticut, Manny Diaz joined a short list of Duke football coaches to start 3-0.
It’s taken two fourth-quarter comebacks, but Duke football coach [autotag]Manny Diaz[/autotag] still has not lost a game through three weeks.
Eight days after the Blue Devils beat Northwestern on the road in overtime, Diaz’s team scored nine points over the final 15 minutes to beat Connecticut 26-21 on Saturday night.
With the win, Diaz became the seventh Blue Devils head coach to start his tenure with three straight wins. In fact, he and his predecessor Mike Elko are the only coaches since 2000 to achieve that feat this century.
The legendary Steve Spurrier also started 3-0, as did Fred Goldsmith, Mike McGee, Tom Harp, and Floyd J. Egan (who did so in 1920).
Of the five previous coaches who started 3-0 since World War II, three of them stayed with the program for at least five seasons. The only two who didn’t, Elko and Spurrier, left for a head coach job in the SEC.
Diaz hopes to start 4-0 with a win over Middle Tennessee in Week 4.
Graham Mertz and DJ Lagway are expected to get significant playing time vs. Texas A&M, so let’s dive into the Gators’ history with the dual quarterback strategy.
The world of college football is always changing and evolving with new strategies and game plans to help teams have success, but there hasn’t been many that have been as intriguing or debated as the use of the dual quarterback system.
For the Florida Gators football team, this dual quarterback approach to the game is nothing new as they will be using that strategy on Saturday when they play the Texas A&M Aggies.
Because of that, let’s dive into Florida’s history with the dual quarterback system. Again, it’s not a new concept for the Gators.
The Mid-1980s
The concept of using several quarterbacks goes back to the mid-1980s. The Gators head coach at the time was Galen Hall who was the offensive coordinator for Florida in 1984 before becoming the interim head coach on Sept. 17 of that same year.
Hall was named the interim head coach because the previous coach, Charley Pell, was fired after an NCAA investigation alleged that he and his coaching staff had committed over 100 violations pertaining to the NCAA rules during the previous couple of seasons.
Allsport /Allsport
Because of this, the Florida football program had a two-year bowl ban, scholarships were lost and there were restrictions on recruiting.
Anyway, Hall took over as head coach and began experimenting with different signal-callers. Despite it not being the team’s primary tactic, these early trials were key to shaping the team’s offensive approach.
The Spurrier Era
Florida’s offensive strategy during the 1990s completely evolved under head coach Steve Spurrier.
Spurrier occasionally used a dual quarterback system to exploit different weaknesses in the defense.
Scott Halleran/Getty Images
In 1994, Spurrier used both quarterbacks Terry Dean and Danny Wuerffel. Wuerffel eventually became Florida’s starting quarterback and won the Heisman Trophy in 1996, but Dean’s presence allowed Spurrier to keep the opponents guessing by mixing up the offense. It created a sense of unpredictability with the Gators offensive attack.
Chris Leak and Tim Tebow
Florida’s head coach from 2005-2010 was Urban Meyer who implemented the spread offense.
Meyer didn’t necessarily use the dual quarterback approach as the team’s offensive strategy, but there were instances where multiple quarterbacks played a significant amount of snaps.
During the 2006 season, Chris Leak was Florida’s starting quarterback and Tim Tebow was the backup. Leak was a more proficient passer but didn’t have the skillset to run the ball like Tebow and Meyer knew that. So, Meyer used Tebow several different ways, mainly in goal-line packages and short-yardage situations.
Jason Parkhurst-USA TODAY Sports
By using Tebow’s strength and power, Meyer was able to create mismatches with the defense while also enabling unpredictable play calls. This strategy played a key role in helping the Gators win a national championship that year.
Feleipe Franks and Emory Jones
Skipping ahead to 2018, the dual quarterback system returned to the Gators offense under head coach Dan Mullen.
Mullen utilized both quarterbacks Feleipe Franks and Emory Jones to create an offensive attack that was effective and efficient.
Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images
Franks was the primary starter for Florida because of his arm and ability to throw the deep ball while Jones was a mobile and dynamic alternative.
The strategy that Mullen implemented was to rotate the quarterbacks depending on the situation of the game. Jones was used for designed runs and unpredictability while Franks was used to execute the primary passing game.
Looking back on the strategy
The dual quarterback approach has proved to be an effective strategy given what it’s done in the history of Florida Gators football. Although the dual quarterback system hasn’t been a constant feature of their strategy, its use in crucial seasons shows the Gators’ readiness to innovate and adapt.
As the Gators roll out in the Swamp against Texas A&M on Saturday afternoon, they’ll be implementing the same strategy that has been engraved in the program’s history over the years.
Both Mertz and Lagway will be seeing significant playing time, but it’s up to Napier to find out which quarterback can help his team win when it matters most.
Coming up for the Gators
Florida will play at home in Ben Hill Griffin Stadium against Texas A&M on Saturday, Sept. 14. Kickoff is set for 3:30 p.m. ET and will be broadcast on ABC.
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Florida football royalty took over the Week 1 edition of SEC Nation and discussed what needs to change for the Gators to return to greatness.
Florida football royalty appeared on SEC Nation Saturday morning in Gainesville ahead of the season opener against Miami.
The two “greatest quarterbacks in the history of Gator football” appeared alongside the man who brought the winning culture to The Swamp — the Head Ball Coach, [autotag]Steve Spurrier[/autotag] — in a segment hosted by UF Journalism School alumna [autotag]Laura Rutledge[/autotag].
Spurrier deflected much of the praise that came from [autotag]Tim Tebow[/autotag] and [autotag]Danny Wuerffel[/autotag], but he offered some commentary on the mentality shift he’d like to see from the Gators after three-straight losing seasons.
“That’s what we need to get back to right there,” Spurrier said after being reminded of a time when Florida consistently competed for the SEC crown.
“Our expectations have got to be up there and go after them. Somebody asked me one time, ‘How did you guys win so many SECs?’ Danny and his guys won four in a row, ’93 through ’96.
“Somebody once said, that what you accomplish in life is proportionate to what you attempt to do. And we tried to win it every year. Y’all did too,” Spurrier said pointing to Tebow. “You can’t win it every year. It just doesn’t work out. But if you try to every year, sometimes you might just do it.”
Wuerffel added to Spurrier’s comments, noting that it takes more than desire to accomplish what his teams did.
“When you have great players, you also have people who care about one another,” Wuerffel said remembering a Tebow comment from earlier.
“There’s some magic that happens when it’s not just about you. You kind of sprinkle that in with some swagger, with maybe the greatest offensive head coach ever (Spurrier) and you make a run.
“I think we were a little ahead of our time. We were cutting edge. Several of those pieces are together now, but this team needs to find their swagger, find what they can do to put a run together.”
Spurrier closed the segment out by remembering a quote from tennis great Arthur Ashe.
“Preparation will build confidence, and confidence leads to success.”
Wuerffel and Tebow concluded that the culture is changing in Gainesville under Billy Napier.
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This Florida football legend is set to be the Gators’ honorary Mr. Two Bits for their season-opener against Miami.
Former Florida football defensive lineman Jevon Kearse is set to serve as the honorary Mr. Two Bits for the game against No. 19 Miami, the University of Florida announced on Tuesday.
Mr. Two Bits is a Florida football tradition that dates back to the 1940s. The title is given to a prominent figure who is invited to lead the crowd in a cheer during the Gators’ football games.
The cheer involves the entire stadium chanting “Two bits! Four bits! Six bits! A dollar! All for the Gators, stand up and holler!”
Jevon Kearse’s Football Career
Kearse, who was nicknamed “the Freak”, played for the Gators from 1996-98, was named SEC Defensive Player of the Year in 1998 and was named First-Team All-SEC in back-to-back seasons (1997-98).
Over his three seasons with Florida, Kearse had 145 tackles including 34.5 tackles for loss, 16.5 sacks, six forced fumbles and an interception.
In 1996, Kearse got his first playing time as a redshirt-freshman under former head coach Steve Spurrier. That season, the Gators went on to win their first national championship in program history.
Kearse was drafted in 1999 by the Tennessee Titans with the 16th-overall pick and immediately took the NFL by storm.
That year, Kearse won the NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year award, was named First-team All-Pro, made the Pro Bowl and was on the PFWA All-Rookie Team.
Kearse also set the NFL record for most sacks in a season by a rookie (14.5).
Kearse went on to play for the Philadelphia Eagles from 2004-07 and finished his career back where he started on the Titans from 2008-09.
Florida’s season opener for 2024
The Florida Gators and No. 19 Miami Hurricanes square off on Aug. 31 in Gainesville, Florida to open their schedule for the 2024 season. Kickoff is set for 3:30 p.m. ET and will be broadcast on ABC Sports.
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