The University of South Carolina announced late on Monday that legendary coach Steve Spurrier was retiring, effective immediately. It came as something of a surprise, but before the start of the season, Spurrier sat down for an extensive interview with Golf Channel’s David Feherty and actually talked about the very subject.He said that while he’s gotten less-intense over the years, he still saw himself at South Carolina for a few more years:

“Age-wise, I’m up there. Mental ability and fitness-wise I hope I’m younger than my age so I feel like I’ve got several more years. But right now we’re all pretty happy. We’ve got a good bunch of players who kind of look you in the eye and say ‘you know, coach, I signed up to play for you.’ And I said ‘Ok I’m going to be here with you, don’t worry.’ So anytime a coach has been there a long time and has a struggled a little bit, they start the rumors: ‘well he’s finished, he’s going to resign, retire, quit, whatever you want to call it. But I feel like we’ve got a group of guys who we’ve got a chance to do a lot of good things with over the next few years.”

Then, coincidentally, host Feherty asked Spurrier if South Carolina would be his last coaching job:

“I think I made a statement that I said this’ll be my last college gig right here and I hope it will be, but who knows? Maybe there’s an assistant coach or consultant on a team. It’s fun being on a team.”

[sigallery id=”mdxHddgKxhVTkyWAyKfD35″ title=”Steve Spurrier Through The Years” type=”sigallery”]