Bill Carr, a football All-American, Gator assistant coach, and athletic director, died at the age of 78. Carr, who died late on February 3, was born in Gainesville as the son of a Baptist minister and raised in Pensacola. He returned to UF, where he became quarterback Steve Spurrier’s center and a standout in his own right, receiving All-SEC and All-America honors during Spurrier’s 1966 Heisman season.
“Wonderful guy, wonderful friend, a super Gator,” Spurrier told the Orlando Sentinel. Spurrier said he visited with Carr during the past month after he’d returned home from rehabilitation for a fall that had previously hospitalized him for several weeks.
“When I visited him, he was somewhat upbeat,” Spurrier recounted. “He usually called me Orr, which is my middle name. And I always called him Willie C.; his name was William Curtis Carr. It appears that we all had a nickname back then.”But he said, “If it’s my time to go to heaven, I’m prepared.” I am prepared. He appeared to glimpse it in the future. Carr, a fourth-round pick by the New Orleans Saints in 1967, spent two years in the United States Army and three years coaching at UF under Doug Dickey (1972-74) before transitioning to administration as an assistant to Gators AD Ray Graves.
Carr became Division I’s youngest athletic director in 1979, replacing his previous coach at the age of 33. He held the position until 1986. At the same time, Jeremy Foley worked in Carr’s department, eventually becoming AD from 1992 to 2016. “Bill’s fingerprints are all over the foundation of this program,” Foley added in his statement. “I have a front-row seat to see his effect and vision. He was one of my earliest mentors. I was extremely fortunate to be on his crew.” Carr held the same job at the University of Houston from 1993 to 1997 before becoming a consultant on over 200 projects across 100 college campuses.
Carr’s son, Scott, is the AD at FIU, but his father has become increasingly disillusioned with the current state of collegiate athletics. Bill Carr spoke with the Orlando Sentinel in the summer of 2021 about the uncertain impact and potential unintended consequences of Name, Image, and Likeness law. “The intercollegiate athletic experience is not an enterprise that it is intended to be a financial endeavor,” that’s what he said. “That is not the point of it. It is diametrically opposed, and I completely disagree.”
However, Carr said that he and other administrators lacked foresight decades ago, when media rights began to generate millions of money that did not flow down to athletes. Carr proposed that a program giving lifetime health insurance, similar to what military personnel receive, would have been a worthwhile investment and a gesture of good faith. “The NCAA should have studied that,” he went on to say. Carr was astounded by the expanding size of football staffs and resources.
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