For most folks, the year 1984 suggests the dystopian world of George Orwell’s novel, that is, unless you live in the state of South Carolina and follow the University of South Carolina’s football team.
You see, few schools that field a major college football team have been as bad as USC. In 119 years of football, USC has won one championship, a 1969 title in a mediocre Atlantic Coast Conference with a thoroughly mediocre 7-4 team. Hardly the stuff of gridiron legend.
The program’s one brief shot at greatness came in 1984.
Black Magic
A new head coach, Joe Morrison, had arrived in Columbia the previous season and posted a 5-6 record, the kind of record that seemed to capture the essence of the program’s century-long futility. Indeed, USC entered the 1984 season with an all-time record of 386-386-37, the very definition of mediocrity. Despite a stirring victory over Southern California, 1983 was (despairingly) very normal – a loss to arch-nemesis Florida State, a loss to arch-rival Clemson, losses in its border rivalry games against Georgia and North Carolina, and for good measure, a blowout loss at home to Notre Dame. Overall, the season didn’t portend much.
And to be sure, the first game of the 1984 season seemed to indicate that more mediocrity was on the way. Carolina hosted The Citadel, the tiny military college from just down I-26, and barely won, 31-24, needing a game-saving tackle to survive in the final moments. That harrowing experience was nothing new. Two years before, USC had lost to Furman, and in 1981, the Cocks were humiliated by Pacific, a school that dropped football entirely just a decade later.
It seemed like just another year in the Piedmont.
But it wasn’t any other year. The Gamecocks would go on to finish 10-2, securing just the school’s second end-of-season national ranking (11th in the final Associated Press poll). Overall, USC spent seven straight weeks ranked in the AP Top 10, lofty heights the program had never reached before. The 10 wins marked the most in school history and stood until last year’s team went 11-2.
The first big test of 1984 was the season’s third game at home versus Georgia. The Bulldogs had always treated USC as a speed bump on the highway of football success and entered that game owning a 30-6-2 record against their “little brother” from across the border. That lopsided history aside, Georgia entered the 1984 game undefeated and had just completed the greatest four-year span in school history, compiling a 43-4-1 record from 1980-83, which included three Southeastern Conference titles and a national championship. It looked certain that Georgia would treat the Gamecocks less than neighborly once again.
I was at that game in 1984, and what I saw that night was one of the greatest games in USC history, a 17-10 win. Oddly, the only play I can recall was the one play I couldn’t actually see. Late in the 4th quarter, back-up quarterback Mike Hold lofted a long pass down the sideline to receiver Ira Hillary. As the ball descended, the rows of people seated in front of me stood in anticipation, and being a little kid, I missed the end of the play. I knew the pass was completed when a raucous roar erupted from the stadium, and two plays later, USC scored the clinching touchdown.
My dad and I were sitting in the upper deck of the east grandstands, and we experienced a phenomenon that others had described the previous season – the upper deck began to sway beneath our feet. The east grandstand’s upper deck was added prior to the 1982 season, and during the 1983 game with Southern Cal (1982 afforded little reason to cheer), fans reported movements in the new upper deck. This led Joe Morrison to utter, “If it ain’t swayin’, we ain’t playin’.” Playing or not, we never again took tickets in the east upper deck.
A Record-Setting Streak
After the Georgia game, USC began an historic win streak. First, the Cocks blistered a lowly Kansas State team, 49-17, but things went from mild optimism to full-fledged frenzy the next week when Carolina defeated Pittsburgh, 45-21. Football fans under the age of 35 might not understand why this was such a big win; after all, it’s just Pitt. But during the late 1970s and early 1980s, few programs in the country were as good as Pitt. Besides, it was just a few years earlier that USC met Pitt in the Gator Bowl, where the Panthers crushed Carolina 37-9, holding USC’s Heisman Trophy-winning running back George Rogers to 113 yards and no touchdowns. In the four seasons prior to 1984, Pitt complied a 39-8-1 record, and despite the Panthers’ 1-4 record entering its 1984 contest with USC, Gamecock fans still had a respect for Pitt that was probably out of whack for team that would finish 3-7-1. Never the less, blowing out Pitt did much to raise the expectation level for the team, particularly with a trip to South Bend looming.
Much like Pitt, Notre Dame was a proud powerhouse of a football program that had fallen on hard times in 1984. The Irish entered that year’s USC game with a 3-3 record, but after getting their butts whipped by Notre Dame the previous year, Carolina didn’t take the Irish lightly, although you couldn’t tell given the awful beginning to the game. The Cocks found themselves in a big hole in this, their first road game of the year, and against college football royalty, no less. Surely, the football gods were going to put right this momentary lapse in the order of things and elevate the Irish to its rightful place in the winner’s circle.
What happened next turned even the most hardened Gamecock cynics into believers. Writing for Sports Illustrated, Jack McCallum captured the moment:
“Midway through the third period in South Bend, with Notre Dame leading 26-14, [Joe] Morrison felt it was time to put the offense on [Mike] Hold, whose entry coincided with the onset of an Irish famine that lasted well into the fourth quarter. Four Irish drives finished punt, interception, punt, fumble. Meanwhile, Hold led the Gamecocks to three touchdowns, scoring the second on a mad 33-yard scramble despite a right knee he’d banged up a few plays earlier. South Carolina’s final touchdown, a four-yard pickup by Quinton Lewis, gave the Gamecocks a 36-26 lead with seven minutes left, and in the next moments the sense of one school on the rise, the other in decline, was inescapable. While Lewis held his arms aloft before a delirious bloc of South Carolina fans—more than 5,000 made the trip—Notre Dame coach Gerry Faust stood on the sidelines, looking upward at a steady, cold rain falling from a you-know-what-kind of October sky.”
Giddy from its first and only victory over the Irish, the Gamecocks then crushed East Carolina and posted a thrilling come-from-behind win at N.C. State in Raleigh. The Cocks were 8-0 and were beginning to garner outside consideration as a national title contender, but to remain in the hunt, Carolina had to defeat its arch-nemesis, Florida State. Like Carolina, FSU was at the time a major Southern independent and was also a johnny-come-lately to major college football. Unlike Carolina, FSU had built itself into a football powerhouse under the direction of Bobby Bowden. Before Bowden arrived in Tallahassee and turned FSU into a monster, the Seminoles weren’t so much different from USC; that’s what made the Seminoles’ success so hard for USC fans to accept. In the last of the pre-Bowden days, Carolina had once visited Tallahassee and demolished FSU 52-12, but things had changed since that day in 1974. In the three games under Bowden against South Carolina, FSU had posted a 3-0 record and had outscored USC 128-63, and 1984 was shaping up to be another solid season for the Noles, who entered the 1984 game against USC with a 6-1-1 record, their lone loss being a 42-41 shootout against Auburn.
Playing to a national television audience, USC finally got the best of FSU and Bowden, winning the game, 35-26. By doing so, it had seemed USC finally broke through. At 9-0, the Gamecocks were no longer a fringe candidate for a national title, but were at the front and center of the conversation, rising to #2 in the AP poll. The ninth straight victory was a school record, and up ahead, the Cocks had a gimme win versus the Naval Academy to set up a season-ending battle royale with arch-rival Clemson. A win there would position Carolina for an unthinkable shot at an honest-to-goodness championship.
Damn You, Lucy Van Pelt
USC started the 1984 season with five straight home games, and seven of its first nine games were at home in Williams Brice Stadium. Perhaps because of the home-heavy schedule, USC athletic director Bob Marcum allowed Navy to host USC in a game that was originally supposed to be at home. Of course, when the decision was made – if, in fact, the story is true – Marcum could not have known that the Gamecocks would be ranked second in the country and undefeated. Indeed, you would have been institutionalized to think such a thing as late as September, but as the calendar turned to mid-November, the Cocks had to venture north to Annapolis for a late-season game in cold weather with a potential national championship on the line.
Despite the foreboding weather, there was nothing really to be concerned about. Navy entered the game 3-5-1 and, just the previous week, looked absolutely lost in a 29-0 loss at Syracuse. Two of its three wins came against Lehigh and Princeton. Really, how much of a threat could the Midshipmen pose?
But it was on the field at Navy-Marine Corps Stadium that the football gods decided to end USC’s Icarus-like flight from mediocrity. There was no last-second debacle, no villainous referee whose whistle summoned the wraiths of seasons past with the game in the balance—just a soul-crushing defeat from the word go, a 38-21 loss that still causes USC faithful to enter into a kind of hazy trance where dream and memory seem to merge into one far-off unreality. If you want to shut up a Gamecock fan, just utter the words “Navy, 1984.”
USC-Georgia Redux
This past weekend, the 2012 edition of the Gamecocks defeated Kentucky in Lexington, and in doing so, USC posted a 5-0 record for only the fifth time in school history. Partly owing to its record-setting 2011 season, the Cocks entered 2012 ranked in the AP Top 10 and have steadily risen since. USC sits at #6 in the latest poll, setting up this weekend’s game with fifth-ranked Georgia as a key contest in the pursuit of an elusive championship. USC has now been ranked among the nation’s Top-10 teams in eight straight polls, dating back to last season. That marks a new school record, surpassing the previous mark of seven, set during (you guessed it) 1984.
The Georgia game is scheduled for a 7 p.m. kickoff at Williams Brice Stadium, and I will be there. While I have attended numerous USC-Georgia games over the years, both in Athens and Columbia, this will be the first USC-UGA night game I have attended since that evening in 1984 when a back-up quarterback launched a long pass to a receiver I couldn’t see.
This could be the time. This could be the year.
If any head coach has a chance to throw sand in the eyes of the football gods, it’s Steve Spurrier, the aging, cantankerous man who takes a strange delight in doing things others can’t. It was Spurrier who last led perennial doormat Duke University to a championship (1989), and it was Spurrier who brought the University of Florida its first championship after years of suffering its own brand of mediocrity. And now, after some truly frustrating seasons at the helm of USC, Spurrier has the Charlie Brown of college football poised, perhaps, to finally kick that damned football. This week’s match-up with Georgia is the first big step.
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