By Will Vandervort / Photo courtesy Clemson University.
In 1977, Charlie Pell inherited a Clemson football program that was filled with talent. He just had to get them to see it.
The previous four years, former head coach Red Parker brought in guys like Jeff and Joe Bostic, Steve Fuller, Jerry Butler, Ken Callicutt, Lester Brown, Dwight Clark, Jim Stuckey, Randy Scott and Bubba Brown. The team was filled with potential up and down the roster.
To do this, Pell—who was Clemson’s defensive coordinator the year before—brought in a brand new coaching staff which included a young offensive line coach named Danny Ford.
“We spent the whole camp trying to get those guys to believe that they could win,” recalled Ford, who coached with Pell at Virginia Tech before coming to Clemson.
Clemson needed to learn how to win and it had to do it in a hurry. The Tigers opened the 1977 season at home against preseason No. 10 Maryland which was followed by playing 17th-ranked Georgia the following week in Athens. After that they traveled to Atlanta to play Georgia Tech and then to Blacksburg, Va., to face Virginia Tech.
To make matters more difficult, no Clemson team had won at Georgia since 1914 – a span of 17 games – while the Tigers had beaten Georgia Tech just three times in Atlanta since 1908.
“It was a tough road, but we had the talent to win those games, which just had to get them to believe it,” Ford said.
That was the hard part. The Tigers were coming off a 3-6-2 campaign in 1976, a season in which they did not win a single ACC game – the only Clemson team not win at least one ACC game since the league began in 1953. It did not help that they outplayed Maryland to open the 1977 season, yet failed to beat the Terps.
The 21-14 loss was a game man-for-man every player and coach on the team felt they should have won. The loss started creeping self-doubt back into the players’ heads.
But Pell knew he could not afford to let his team sulk over the loss. They were headed to Georgia next and if he did not convince his team they could beat the Bulldogs then the season could get out of control pretty fast.
“I felt that we’d be good sometime during the year because of all the hard work that our players and coaches had put in,” said Pell in the book The Clemson Tigers from 1986 to Glory. “But, at the start of the season, I didn’t know when we’d be good or how good we would be.”
If the program at Clemson was to turn around, the Tigers knew they had to go to Georgia and do something special. The Bulldogs were the defending SEC Champions and were one of the standards for success in that era.
They were where Clemson wanted to be and the only way to get there was to not just compete against them, but beat them.
“That game gave us the realization that we belonged,” Scott said.
Pell was a player’s coach and was a masterful motivator. No one knows what was said in that Clemson locker room besides those that were in it, but Pell got his Tigers to believe in him and his coaches that day and more importantly got them to believe in themselves.
Playing in the rain for much of the afternoon, the Tigers and Bulldogs battled in what can be classified as a defensive struggle. Clemson managed only 236 yards of offense as Fuller completed just four passes and fumbled twice, losing one of them. The Bulldogs weren’t much better. Georgia had only 280 total yards and turned the football over four times – two interceptions and two fumbles.
The Tigers broke a scoreless game in the third quarter following a Georgia muffed punt on its own 49-yard line. After two runs by Tracy Perry picked up a Clemson first down, Fuller found wide receiver Jerry Butler for 15 yards and a first down at the 23-yard line.
On third-and-10 a few plays later, Fuller went over the middle to Dwight Clark for 17 yards and the Tigers had a first-and-goal at the Georgia six. Two plays after that, following a Georgia penalty, Lester Brown went over from two yards out to give Clemson a 7-0 lead with 6:24 to play in the quarter.
Clemson held that lead until the final seconds when the Bulldogs scored with six seconds to play and elected to go for the win instead of the tie. However, Clemson defensive end Steve Gibbs broke up a pass on the two-point conversion to seal the Tigers’ 7-6 victory.
“That win in Athens gave us the confidence to become a good team,” Scott said.
Clemson followed the Georgia win by winning its next six games. It finished the regular season with an 8-2-1 record and accepted a bid to the Gator Bowl following a dramatic 31-27 victory over rival South Carolina in the season finale. The Gator Bowl marked the program’s first bowl appearance in 18 years.
The next season, Pell guided the Tigers to a 10-1 regular season record, which included nine straight wins to close the year and an ACC Championship. Just two seasons removed from a season in which they went winless in conference play, many of those same players were now champions.
“The story of today’s game is more than what happened on the playing field,” Pell said following Clemson’s 28-24 victory at Maryland to clinch the ACC title. “It’s something that was two years in the making, and it took an unbelievable amount of work and dedication from our coaches and players.
“Last year, we learned how to win. This year, mainly in the last two weeks, we’ve shown that we have what it takes to win by coming from behind.”
Pell, who left Clemson for Florida following the South Carolina game, had an 18-4-1 record in his two seasons at Clemson. Indeed, he taught the Tigers how to win.
Editor’s note: This story was an insert from the book I co-authored last summer called Clemson: Where the Tigers Play, which you can buy on amazon.com. This is the sixth in a series of stories that chronicles how these coaches turned Clemson into the football power it has come to be over the years.