He thought about it, but in the end, Steve Spurrier isn’t finished coaching college football yet.

“When you do it as long as I have, and you lose games the way we did this year, you have those thoughts that maybe it’s time to let somebody else come in here and do this,” Spurrier said in a recent interview with ESPN’s Chris Low. “You wonder, ‘What am I doing?’ That’s only normal, but I think everybody knows now that I’ve still got four or five more years in me.

“I’ve always said that I won’t retire. I’ll resign, sort of like what (77-year-old) Dick LeBeau said the other day when he resigned from the Steelers. He said that he wasn’t retiring. I feel the same way. Retiring sounds too much like you’re going to quit and do nothing.”

Never one to take losing lightly, the Head Ball Coach has shouldered much of the blame since December for a 2014 season that didn’t end the way the Gamecocks had envisioned. The sexy preseason pick to win the SEC’s Eastern Division, South Carolina lost six games — including three with a double-digit lead in the fourth quarter — and saw its five-year winning streak over Clemson snapped in Death Valley.

Retirement questions persisted for Spurrier throughout, especially after a catastrophic November loss to Tennessee in overtime put the Gamecocks under .500 for the first time since the HBC’s first season in 2005.

“As a coach, all you can ever ask is to play as hard as you can, play as smart as you can, and the outcome will take care of itself,” Spurrier said. “We didn’t do either of those this year. As a team, we didn’t play with tremendous effort or smarts, and I think that’s a big reason we lost the games we did. That starts with me as the head coach.”

Spurrier has stated his has a ‘4-5 year plan’ to stick around since earlier comments pertaining to his future were detrimental to the Gamecocks’ 2015 recruiting class. Following several decommitments, he backtracked and has made it clear he intends on coaching until he says otherwise.

When will that be? Only Spurrier knows.

“Sometimes, you just have to forget the number on your age and physically and mentally see where you’re at, and that sort of determines your ability to function,” he said. “I know I’ve got a lot left in me to keep coaching.”