The Receiver Who Caught Everything
By Buddy Martin
He wasn’t fast. Let’s get that out of the way, because Charlie Casey would have told you so himself
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He was deliberate. He ran a 10- or 11-yard out route like a man signing his name, the same way every time, and in the mid-1960s, when defensive backs still played soft and nobody had heard of bump-and-run, you could complete that pass just about any time you wanted.
Florida wanted to a lot.
Charlie Casey, the All-American end who caught Steve Spurrier’s passes before anybody in the Southeastern Conference really knew what a passing game was, has passed away at 82. When I heard, I went back and watched the old plays. Then I called the Head Ball Coach.
“Charlie was our best receiver my sophomore and junior year,” Spurrier said. “He was a year ahead of me. He was a guy that caught everything.” He means that almost literally.
The Day Spurrier Directed Traffic
Every Gator of a certain age knows the play. Nov. 27, 1965, Florida Field. Florida State had just driven 86 yards and taken a 17-16 lead with 2:10 left, and 49,513 people were sitting in stunned silence.
Spurrier needed 58 seconds.
Here’s how he remembers the touchdown:
“I called a sprint-out, out route. Everybody played off back then. So I rolled out, sort of throw-and-run, and he’d run about a 10-, 11-yard out. One of the FSU guys jumped offside. There was hardly any pass rush at all, and I figured I had a free play. So I just waved him, ‘Go deep!’
“You’d think we practiced it all the time. He put his foot in the ground, went deep, and I hit him for the touchdown that put us ahead.”
That was the Spurrier “direct traffic” game, long before he was drawing up the Fun ’n’ Gun on a visor. A quarterback on the run, pointing his receiver upfield like a cop at a busy intersection, and a receiver smart enough to understand the instructions instantly.
The ball arrived in the end zone with 1:12 to play. Florida won 30-17. Casey caught seven passes for 107 yards that afternoon, according to the Tallahassee Democrat’s Bill McGrotha Florida’s “two superb All-Americans,” Spurrier and Casey, won it.
The One That Got Away
Spurrier can also tell you about the only pass Casey ever dropped. He knows the year, the stadium and the route.
“He’d tell you the one pass he dropped. That was against FSU, at FSU, in ’64,” Spurrier said. “It was sort of an out-and-up. I hit him, and the safety was coming over. He said, ‘I saw the safety coming. I was going to catch it and undercut him, and I just took my eye off the ball for a minute.’
“So he dropped one pass in the two years I got to play with him.”
One drop in two years, and 60 years later his quarterback still remembers it. That tells you how rare it was.
The Numbers Behind the Hands
The numbers back up the memory. In 1964 Casey led the SEC with 47 catches for 673 yards, despite being double-teamed routinely. In 1965 he broke his own school records with 58 catches, 809 yards and eight touchdowns, and he finished his career as the leading receiver in SEC history, with 1,612 receiving yards.
He was a first-team All-American by the Associated Press and the coaches in 1965, played in the Senior Bowl, and was an Academic All-American too. He majored in art. He went into the University of Florida Athletic Hall of Fame, and the Florida Sports Hall of Fame as well.
“He was definitely the main target in ’65,” Spurrier said. He remembers the Sugar Bowl against Missouri on Jan. 1, 1966, when Florida fell behind 20-0 and then put the ball in the air on nearly every down.
“I don’t know how many passes he caught in the Sugar Bowl, but it was a bunch of ’em, ’cause we threw almost every down there in the second half.”
The Gators completed 27 passes for 352 yards that day. One of them was a 21-yard touchdown to Casey. Florida lost 20-18 after missing three two-point conversions, and Spurrier became the first player from a losing team to be named Sugar Bowl MVP. The quarterback got the trophy. The receiver had a lot to do with it.
The First of His Kind
Near the end of our conversation, Spurrier had one more thought.
“You know what, he might have been Florida’s first-ever All-American wide receiver,” he said. “Nobody really threw the ball until about ’64, ’65, right in there. We started throwing a little bit.”
Technically, Dale Van Sickel was an All-American end for the Gators back in 1928, in a different game in a different century. But Spurrier’s point holds up. Charlie Casey was the first Florida receiver who mattered because the ball was actually coming to him. Carlos Alvarez came later, then Wes Chandler, Cris Collinsworth, Ricky Nattiel, Jack Jackson, Reidel Anthony, Ike Hilliard. Every one of them runs a route that started with Charlie Casey deliberately running an out at Florida Field.
“He was a great guy,” Spurrier said. “We all had a lot of fun together. He played golf. He was a pretty decent golfer.”
Casey had been in poor health the last several years, living down in Fort Myers. When the 1966 team got together for its reunion this past year, the old Gators thought about him.
“Charlie was a good friend, good guy, wonderful,” Spurrier said. “He had a good life.”
He wasn’t fast. He didn’t need to be. He caught everything, except that one in Tallahassee, and Steve Spurrier still hasn’t forgotten it.
Rest easy, Charlie. The ball’s on its way.
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