From The Scout Team To Atlanta: Chris Doering Finally Gets His Due
He left in 1995 with 31 touchdown catches, still the school record and second in SEC history. Think about the receivers who have come through Gainesville since then
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By Buddy Martin
They used to hand Chris Doering a scout-team jersey and tell him to go get hit. He’d take the beating, show up the next day, and take it again. No scholarship or promise came with it, and nobody in Gainesville was printing his name in the program.
He was a skinny kid from P.K. Yonge whose dream was bigger than his resume. Thirty-five years later, that kid is an SEC Legend. Doering was named Thursday last week to the 2026 SEC Football Legends class.
It’s a 16-member group full of Heisman Trophy winners, national champions and NFL stars: Nick Saban of Alabama, Mark Richt of Georgia, Billy Sims of Oklahoma, Patrick Peterson of LSU, Randall Cobb of Kentucky and Ricky Williams of Texas.
The walk-on is standing in that crowd. Tell me this game doesn’t still make room for a good story.
“The Scarlet Letter”
You have to understand how much that label stung. “I hated being called a walk-on,” Doering told me on The Buddy Martin Show. “It was such a scarlet letter to me. It always felt like it was just less than everybody else. So I wanted that validation of having a scholarship. It meant more to me when I finally got it.”
So he tore it off. Doering walked on for Steve Spurrier in 1991 and had a scholarship before his sophomore season. Nobody gave it to him. He took it, one scout-team rep at a time. Then he went out and rewrote the Florida record book.
He left in 1995 with 31 touchdown catches, still the school record and second in SEC history. Think about the receivers who have come through Gainesville since then. None of them has caught him.
He finished with 149 catches for more than 2,000 yards. His senior season was something special: 70 catches, 1,045 yards and 17 touchdowns. That earned him second-team All-America from The Associated Press and first-team All-SEC from both the league’s coaches and the AP. The 17 scores still rank second on Florida’s single-season list.
Doering wasn’t a passenger, either. He helped the Gators win three straight SEC titles from 1993 to 1995. Jacksonville drafted him in the sixth round in 1996, and he lasted 10 seasons in the NFL with Indianapolis, Denver, Washington and Pittsburgh.
Ten years is a long time for a guy they once said was too slow and too small and not on scholarship.
The Phone Call
The best part of this story isn’t the stats. It’s the phone call. Last summer, Florida SID Scott Burns called Doering. He said coach Jon Sumrall wanted to know whether Doering would be doing his show in Atlanta for SEC Championship weekend, and whether he’d speak to the team the Friday night before the game.
Doering admits his first thought was a raised eyebrow. “I’m thinking, ‘Man, first year, they’re already ambitious enough to believe they’re going to be in the SEC Championship Game?’” he said. “I was like, ‘Sure, I’ll be happy to do it.’ I figured we’d cross that bridge when we got there.”
A few weeks later, with Florida in preseason camp, Burns called back. He wanted to “run something past” Doering, Tuesday at 2:35. The phone rang. Doering picked up and said, “What’s up, Scott?”
It wasn’t Scott. “Hey, this is actually Coach Sumrall. They talked football for a few minutes, the camp and what the staff was seeing. Then Sumrall told him why he’d really called. “He goes, ‘Well, sorry to mislead you, but we just wanted to break the news to you that you’re going to be the legend representative for the Gators when we go to SEC Championship weekend,’” Doering said.
“I was almost in tears just hearing him say that. To have him take the time during training camp to deliver that news to me really made it even more special.”
Give Sumrall credit. A first-year head coach in the middle of camp has a hundred things to do. He stopped to make that call himself, and that tells you he understands what Florida football is supposed to mean.
What Kept Him Going
As for the scout team, people don’t know how punishing it is. Every walk-on has two or three days when you’re ready to quit, beat up, ignored and wondering why you’re doing it. Doering didn’t quit. I asked him what kept him going.
“Couple things stand out to me, Buddy,” he said. “One, we have this ignorance in life, some naivety, we’ll call it. Luckily, we never know how hard the journey’s going to be. Because if we knew in advance how hard it was going to be, we probably wouldn’t sign up for it, you know?
“So I didn’t know what I was getting into. I believed in myself, and my parents supported me as a walk-on, paying for my school and housing and everything else. And so I just did it.
“And the luck that I had in playing for Coach Spurrier, who didn’t care if you were a walk-on or a scholarship player. He just wanted guys to compete and do the things they were coached to do. So I was just lucky with the timing of all of it.” Lucky? Maybe a little.
But luck doesn’t get you through a year of getting knocked flat by scholarship players while your parents pay the rent. Even after he made it, the road kept turning on him.
He became a hero at Kentucky, led the conference in catches a couple of weeks later, then landed in Spurrier’s doghouse and lost his playing time for the rest of the season. He had to earn his way back again.
“It’s never a direct path,” Doering said. “Success takes longer and is more of a convoluted path. But at the end, the sacrifice you make and the work you put in makes it that much more gratifying.”
Some people have asked him why this honor took so long. He doesn’t see it that way.
“There’s hundreds of players every single year on this team,” he said. “There’s way better players than I am that still haven’t been recognized. … So I’m just grateful to have the honor.”
That’s how a former walk-on thinks, even 30 years later.
The Last One
Now for the part that hurts. “We’re about to be in the last SEC Championship that we’ll ever have,” Doering said.
With playoff expansion coming, he believes this December’s game in Atlanta will be the final one. For those of us who watched it grow, that’s hard news.
Florida built that game. Spurrier, Wuerffel, Doering and a whole line of Gator All-Americans left their mark on it. The idea that it could disappear is devastating to all of them, and to me.
I reminded him of something Spurrier often says and Nick Saban said not long ago: for teams in the South, winning the SEC meant more than winning the national championship. That was certainly true in Florida.
Doering was there at the beginning. He played in the first four.
“At the inception of the SEC Championship Game in ’92, when we went to Birmingham, we were like, ‘What is this?’” he said. “We had no idea what it was. It quickly became the original conference championship game. Nobody ever did it as good as the SEC did, especially when we moved to Atlanta and what it became. “It does mean more. I would say now you have a better chance of winning a national championship than you do an SEC championship, with only two teams making it. It’s a very huge honor to even play in that game.”
If he’s right about this year, the timing is almost too neat. A guy who was there at the start will be honored at the finish. The legend class will be celebrated Dec. 4 at the SEC Legends Celebration presented by T-Mobile at the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta. The honorees will be recognized again Dec. 5 before the SEC Championship Game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. ‘Doering’s Got a Touchdown!’
No Gator fan will ever forget the night of Sept. 11, 1993, in Lexington. Florida’s quarterbacks threw seven interceptions that night. The Gators trailed Kentucky 20-17 with seconds left. Then redshirt freshman Danny Wuerffel fired a 28-yard pass over the middle to the former walk-on, and Mick Hubert lost his mind on the radio:
“DOERING’S GOT A TOUCHDOWN! DOERING’S GOT A TOUCHDOWN! OHHHH MYYYY!”
Florida won 24-20 with three seconds to play. Doering has said that catch “changed the trajectory of my life.” It also helped launch a run of four straight SEC titles.
Plenty of players arrive at Florida with five stars and a scholarship. Chris Doering arrived with nothing but stubbornness.
They gave him a scout-team jersey and expected him to disappear, and in December he’s going to Atlanta as a legend. Doering’s got a touchdown! Again. Make that “The Legend’s Got A Touchdown!”
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