Steve Spurrier’s 49ers Career: The NFL Story Behind the Legend
The Draft That Made No Obvious Sense
Two things were true on the morning of the 1967 NFL Draft. The San Francisco 49ers already had one of the best quarterbacks in football. And they spent the third overall pick – trading three veterans to Atlanta to move up and get it – on a quarterback anyway.
Steve Spurrier had just won the 1966 Heisman Trophy at Florida. He was the most coveted signal-caller in the draft, taken one spot ahead of Bob Griese, who would go on to win two Super Bowls with the Dolphins and eventually land in Canton. Spurrier signed a three-year rookie contract worth $600,000 – the richest for any rookie at the time. The 49ers told him he was being groomed to replace John Brodie “in four or five years.”
Brodie was 31, entering his eleventh NFL season, and showed absolutely no signs of decline. He would win league MVP in 1970. The job Spurrier was promised wouldn’t fully arrive for seven years, and when it finally did, a dislocated shoulder in a preseason game wiped out the entire season before it started.
That’s the Spurrier-49ers story in miniature: extraordinary promise, almost no follow-through, and a man who somehow made the most of it anyway.
Nine Years Behind John Brodie
In three of his first five NFL seasons, Spurrier attempted fewer than five passes total. Not per game. Total. His primary job was punter – and he was good at it, averaging 38.3 yards across 230 career punts with a long of 61 yards. The quarterback who won the Heisman spent most Sunday afternoons in Kezar Stadium and then Candlestick Park waiting on the kicking unit.
“I was not a very ambitious player,” Spurrier admitted in his 2016 autobiography. That’s about as honest as a retired athlete gets about his own playing career.
The situation wasn’t entirely on Spurrier. Brodie was legitimately elite. He led the league in passing yards and won the NFL MVP in 1970, leading San Francisco to a 10-3-1 record. In today’s NFL, using a top-three pick on a quarterback to eventually replace an active Pro Bowler would invite immediate ridicule. In 1967, it was just draft strategy. Spurrier spent practices studying opposing defenses and passing his observations to Brodie during games – which, depending on how you look at it, was either a waste of talent or the most valuable film study of his life.
He didn’t throw a touchdown pass until his third pro season. By 1971, it was clear Brodie wasn’t leaving until he chose to.
1972: The Season Spurrier Actually Got to Play
On October 15, 1972, Brodie took a hit against the New York Giants and suffered an ankle injury that would sideline him for nearly two months. Spurrier stepped in at 27 years old, seven seasons into his NFL career, for his first real extended run as a starter.
He went 6-2-1 across nine starts. He threw 18 touchdown passes, second-best in the entire NFL that season. San Francisco was 2-3 when he took over; the team finished 8-5-1 and claimed the NFC West title for the third consecutive year.
His best single performance came November 19 against the Chicago Bears – 17 completions on 27 attempts, 275 yards, five touchdown passes to four different receivers: Gene Washington, Vic Washington, Larry Schreiber, and Ted Kwalick. The five-TD game tied a then-franchise record shared by Y.A. Tittle and Brodie himself.
The season finale is where the story gets complicated. San Francisco needed a win over Minnesota to clinch the division. Spurrier started, the 49ers fell behind 17-6, and with less than two minutes left in the third quarter, head coach Dick Nolan pulled him and sent Brodie – who had barely practiced in two months – onto the field. The Candlestick crowd roared. Brodie promptly threw two interceptions, then engineered a 99-yard touchdown drive in the fourth quarter and hit Dick Witcher in the end zone with 25 seconds left for a 20-17 win.
Nolan started Brodie in the playoff game against Dallas. Spurrier didn’t play a snap. The Cowboys won 30-28.
1973: The Record Game Nobody Remembers
His statistically most impressive single outing as a 49er came the following year, in the fifth game of 1973 against the Minnesota Vikings at old Metropolitan Stadium. Spurrier completed 31 of 48 passes for 320 yards – a team record at the time. Teammates later claimed he was drawing up plays in the huddle in the snow.
The 49ers lost 17-14. Spurrier threw two interceptions. His knee flared up afterward, Nolan started third-stringer Joe Reed the next week, and Spurrier’s season was effectively over.
The 31 completions stood as a San Francisco single-game record. It didn’t get him another start for the rest of that year.
The Shoulder, the Traffic Accident, and the Job That Kept Slipping Away
Brodie retired after 1973. For the first time in his career, Spurrier entered a training camp as the presumptive starter. He dominated the preseason. The job was his.
In the final exhibition game of 1974, he suffered a badly dislocated shoulder. Surgery. The entire regular season gone.
During the offseason, a traffic accident reaggravated the shoulder. He went into 1975 as the backup again, this time to veteran Norm Snead.
The 49ers started 2-5. Spurrier went to Nolan and asked for one start – against the Los Angeles Rams, a team that had dominated San Francisco throughout his tenure. Nolan agreed. Spurrier threw for 240 yards and three touchdowns with no interceptions in a 24-23 comeback win. He called it the best game of his professional career.
It earned him the starting job. The team won its next two games. Then they lost four straight, Spurrier went back to the bench, Nolan was fired, and incoming coach Monte Clark traded for Jim Plunkett. Spurrier’s final record as a starter with San Francisco: 13 wins, 12 losses, one tie.
The Trade to Tampa Bay and the End of His Playing Career
In April 1976, the 49ers sent Spurrier to the expansion Tampa Bay Buccaneers in exchange for two players and a second-round draft pick – part of the new franchise’s very first trade. In Tampa, he was greeted with genuine local excitement. He had been a college star at Florida, and Buccaneers fans knew exactly who he was.
The 1976 Buccaneers went 0-14. It was the worst season in NFL history at the time. Spurrier appeared in games but never quite seized the starting role in a meaningful way. He retired after the season at 31.
Career NFL numbers: 106 games, 597 completions on 1,151 attempts, 51.9 percent, 6,878 yards, 40 touchdowns, 60 interceptions, 60.1 passer rating. Nine of those ten seasons were in San Francisco.
The TD-INT ratio looks rough. It has to be read in context – he threw in an era when 60 percent completion rates were exceptional, and the majority of his attempts came as a backup mopping up games or stepping in cold after an injury. His 1972 season, the one extended stretch where he functioned as a full-time starter with consistent preparation, produced 18 touchdowns against 16 interceptions. That’s a different picture.
What the 49ers Years Actually Built
At a 2019 reunion of the 1970 San Francisco team, Spurrier found Brodie and delivered what is probably the most disarming thing any backup quarterback has ever said to the man who blocked him: “Brod, I want to thank you for being the starter those seven years because I got 10 years in the NFL, so my pension is real good thanks to you and I didn’t even have to play.”
That’s self-deprecating to the point of being funny. It’s also not quite accurate, because what Spurrier did during those years on the bench mattered.
He spent games watching defensive coverages, charting what worked and what didn’t, feeding information to Brodie during drives. He described the 49ers offense of the late 1960s as relatively simple – not many plays, straightforward defensive schemes from opponents – but the habit of reading a defense before, during, and after a snap became foundational. When he eventually became an offensive coordinator at Duke in the early 1980s, the pass-first system he began developing there drew on years of that sideline observation.
The Fun ‘n’ Gun offense that would transform SEC football in the 1990s didn’t materialize from nowhere. Spurrier spent a decade absorbing what defenses do and why – first as a punter-quarterback hybrid in San Francisco, then as a QB coach at Florida (1978) and Georgia Tech (1979), then as Duke’s offensive coordinator from 1980 through 1982. By the time he took the Florida head coaching job in 1990, the system was fully formed.
He coached the Gators to six SEC championships and a national title in 1996. In 2017, he was inducted into the National Football Foundation’s College Football Hall of Fame as a coach, having already been inducted as a player in 1986. He became the first Heisman winner to coach another Heisman winner when Danny Wuerffel won the award in 1996.
None of that erases what his NFL playing career was. He was a $600,000 rookie who spent most of his twenties as a punter and backup, had the starting job within reach twice and lost it to injury both times, and finished with a passer rating of 60.1. But the habit of watching, analyzing, and questioning what he saw – developed across nine seasons in San Francisco precisely because he had nothing else to do on game days – almost certainly shaped the coach he became. His time with the 49ers is less a story of failure than one of misdirected talent finding its right outlet fifteen years later.
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