Saturday is USC’s championship game. As it has every year for more than 100 years, USC’s season will be judged on the result of that one game. looking for a few cherries on what’s been a delicious treat of a year. The Tigers will play for the ACC championship next week and are looking to nab their first BCS bowl appearance. All that’s in the way is USC, playing for another win, another goal and the all-important bragging rights. It has been more than 1,000 days since Clemson last beat USC in football. The Gamecocks want to keep adding to that tally. “It’s kind of fun to talk about it, although maybe I wish we didn’t have to,” laughed Tommy Suggs, who quarterbacked those three USC teams from 1968-70 and never knew the sting of losing USC’s biggest game. “It is, to a degree, kind of amazing that over the course of the years, we haven’t been able to put three together on them [again]. Just been one of those crazy things in sports, I guess.” “It’s nice to be able to reminisce and be able to think about some accomplishments early in life,” he says. “We’re awful proud of it.” Suggs, the current color man for the Gamecocks’ radio team, remains a legend for being the last quarterback to go undefeated against Clemson, although it was when freshmen were ineligible to play varsity ball. Still, Suggs took his freshman football team to Clemson in 1967 and won then as well (freshman team records are not reflected in a varsity program’s overall record), technically going a sterling 4-0 against the Tigers and winning three times at Clemson’s Memorial Stadium (or the “borrowed” nickname of
usc VS clemson
Death Valley). Aside from that period of the rivalry, it’s mostly been all Clemson all the time. The Gamecocks won the first installment of the rivalry in 1896, then lost the next four games. The Tigers built a commanding 41-27 series lead through the 1974 season, a hefty but not impossible deficit to overcome. It seemed the Gamecocks were on the upswing in 1975, when another fabled USC signalcaller, Jeff Grantz, led a 56-20 rout of Clemson. Still the most points the Gamecocks have ever put up on the Tigers, it was a grand day for USC but the beginning of the end. Coaches and players on that Clemson team said that it would never happen again. From then through 2009, USC never won more than one game in a stretch against Clemson, and the Tigers stretched the rivalry lead so far that it might never be reversed (69-35-4). Steve Spurrier is the coach who finally led the Gamecocks to nab two consecutive wins again, upsetting a high-flying Tiger team that was about to play for the ACC title the next week in 2009. In 2010, a more talented Gamecock squad went to the Valley and thoroughly beat the Tigers 29-7, giving USC the long awaited twice-as-nice slogan it had been aching to use for 40 years. As in 2009, the Tigers are coming to Columbia with an exciting offense and a berth in the league title game next week. USC is coming into the game with a solid record but no other
game until late December or early January. Clemson might have the edge in talent, but the Gamecocks have the home field and the knowledge that they have won two straight over the Tigers, something no other Gamecock team has done in four decades. “Three!” has been the rallying cry since the preseason, even as bigger goals were planned. Those goals bit the dust when USC lost two SEC games. This one is still very much alive. Suggs said he wouldn’t be giving any motivational speeches to this year’s Gamecocks about winning three straight, because none of them were born the last time it was done and plenty of players have been there for two straight. It’s also not Spurrier’s
1967 win being a freshman win, not a varsity win). Clemson’s field general from 2002 to 2005, Whitehurst became as beloved in the Upstate as he was despised in Columbia. “As for the 4-0 record, I am very proud to be a part of that — not necessarily as some accomplishment that my name might be tied to, and not because of my learned and thorough distaste for Carolina football, but because I love Clemson,” Whitehurst wrote in the foreword to the just-released Classic Clashes of the Carolina-Clemson Football Rivalry: A State of Disunion. “I know the joy that was felt by the entire Clemson Nation the nights after those four victories. I also know those were some bad years to be a Gamecock fan.”
Clemson’s Sammy Watkins carries the ball against Georgia Tech on Oct. 29. Photo by Zachary Hanby. style, he said, to do that kind of thing, leaving it to the team’s upperclassmen to stress it. “The juniors have never lost to Clemson,” Suggs said. “They’ll probably be aware of it and maybe play a little bit harder.” The USC game means nothing to Clemson except breaking the two-year string and polishing a double digit-win season. Still, the Tigers will doubtless be ready to play, spurred by the words of one of their finest. Charlie Whitehurst is the only quarterback in rivalry history to win four games over the other team (due to Suggs’
Since Whitehurst completed his career, USC has beaten the Tigers three times and lost twice. It’s a run of success that has hardly ever happened and USC wants those good times to last. There’s only one way to do it. “They’ve had a remarkable year based on everything they have been faced with,” Suggs said. “They have just found a way to win, like our baseball team. This is the best coaching year [Spurrier] has ever had. Period.” It can get better, with one simple word. “Three.”
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