One of our editors sent out an e-mail the other day soliciting ideas for a wish list of 10 things that will make college football better.

I have only item on my list:

Make Steve Spurrier relevant again.

More than a playoff, more than a moratorium on new bowls, more than a disinfectant to clean the slimy spot on the sideline where Bobby Petrino stands, college football needs Spurrier back on the big stage. This revelation hit me recently at the Southeastern Conference’s annual preseason media gathering where, one after another, we watched an array of ultra-serious, hyper-focused coaches like Urban Meyer and Nick Saban take the podium.

Help! College football is being taken over by the Stepford Coaches – cookie-cutter clones whose idea of candor and color is the forced smile they put on for the Nokia photo op. Like it or not, these are the rock-star coaches of the YouTube generation. Click on them and hear their recruiting spiel.

You know the sport is in need of a personality transplant when the latest issue of Forbes magazine features Saban on the cover and calls him the most powerful coach in sports. Good grief, if Nick Saban is the face of college football then you might as well put a Beano Cook mask over the entire sport.

Remember when Spurrier was the brash, smirking face of college ball – the big-talking, wisecracking smart aleck who everybody loved to hate? He made every game into an event and turned every opponent into a punch line.

To Spurrier, FSU was “Free Shoes U” and Tennessee was UT – and everybody knows “you can’t spell Citrus Bowl without UT.”

Have you noticed that no game Florida plays now seems quite as monumental since Spurrier left? Sure, games against Florida State, Tennessee and Georgia still mean more than ever to the Gators, they just seem a little less interesting to everybody else.

Now Spurrier is coaching at South Carolina, which might as well be South Dakota with the way he’s disappeared from the radar screen. He has gone from a proud place of prominence in the coaching hierarchy to an obscure spot on the periphery.

The other day I ranked the SEC coaches from 1 to 12, and Spurrier astonishingly finished sixth – below Meyer, Saban, LSU’s Les Miles, Georgia’s Mark Richt and Auburn’s Tommy Tuberville. That’s right, one of the greatest coaches in the history of college football is now middle-of-the-pack in his own league.

Spurrier was the last coach scheduled to speak at the SEC’s media gathering, and when he took the podium he humbly expressed his gratitude to a roomful of writers.

“I appreciate you guys hanging around to the end,” he said.

The audacity has been replaced by reality. He’s at a program now that has never really won, and it’s starting to look like it never really will. I thought Spurrier would win sooner rather than later at South Carolina. Now I wonder if he will win at all.

If ever college football needed Steve Spurrier’s return to prominence, this is the time.

Where have you gone, Darth Visor? Where have you gone, Steve Superior? Where have you gone, Mr. Fun and Gun?

Come back and save us from the stony, hyper-focused gaze of the Stepford Coaches.