Buddy Pough’s curtain call: Why SC State legend is retiring now. And what’s next?
Some day, South Carolina State football coach Buddy Pough will be able to sit back and reminisce on all he’s accomplished, from conference championships to national championships to the lasting relationships he’s built over two decades.
Wednesday was not that day.
S.C. State was three days away from its season finale at Norfolk State, and practice that morning, in the words of Pough, was “not pretty.” Now he was sitting in the back of a film room in the school’s athletics building, reviewing tape and trying to figure out how a Bulldogs team that mustered just one offensive touchdown last week was going to turn things around.
Pough’s offensive coordinator, Kevin Magouirk, opened up a clip of a running back toss play from that morning’s practice on a projector. S.C. State’s right tackle was slow off the snap and couldn’t make a clean block. In a real game, the running back would’ve been stuffed for a loss of at least 5 yards by the defensive end.
“We don’t have it,” Pough said.
Cut to another run play. Two tight ends looked hesitant, confused.
“I’m not sure who they’re blocking,” Pough said.
Then a slow-developing pop pass right at the goal line.
“I’m not sure if we’ll get that off.”
Finally, a dropped pass. Pough groaned.
“Easy peasy,” he said.
Then it was on to the next duty for Pough, who certainly didn’t look, act or sound like a coach days away from hanging it up after clocking in for 22 seasons and achieving every accomplishment in the book at S.C. State, a historically Black college in Orangeburg, about halfway between Columbia and Charleston.
But that’s reality. Pough, 70, announced Aug. 24 that the 2023 football season would be his last with the Bulldogs, where he’s coached since 2002 and is the school’s all-time wins leader. It was his decision, Pough said. Nobody was running him off.
Now, with S.C. State sitting at 4-6 overall, comfortably out of contention for any postseason games, the end of his Bulldogs tenure was near. Three days and one game were all that separated Pough from something he hadn’t experienced in 47 years:
No football team to coach.
That, he said in August, was “a bit tough to give up.”
Why does a legend decide to say goodbye? And what’s next? The State shadowed Pough during his final week of game prep to figure out as much.
Early practice? No problem
The overhead lights at Oliver C. Dawson Stadium flickered on at 5:59 a.m. Wednesday ahead of S.C. State’s scheduled 6:15 a.m. practice. Pough, as per usual, had been up much earlier than the 5:45 a.m. alarm he sets daily but never uses.
“About 3:30 or 3:45,” he said.
That’s been his routine for at least a decade, dating back to when he shifted South Carolina State football practices to the early morning, primarily so he wouldn’t have to compete with class schedules for player availability and to give his team full sessions without worrying about heat. (The program has no indoor facility.)
Consider it one small part of a winning formula for the Bulldogs, who compete at the NCAA Division I FCS level — a step below the FBS level that includes Power Five teams such as Clemson and South Carolina — but long ago established a rich history.
When Pough (pronounced PEW) was hired in 2002, S.C. State, his alma mater, already claimed five Black college football national championships and boasted two NFL Hall of Famers and a trailblazing coach who’s also been a lifelong mentor.
An all-conference lineman under Willie Jeffries in the 1970s, Pough had “monster-sized shoes” to fill when he succeeded his former coach, as S.C. State’s president put it earlier this year. And Pough, to this day, will argue there’s really no one-upping Jeffries, 86, who coached 19 seasons at the school during two stints and remains an active supporter of and ambassador for the football program and university.
“You don’t replace Coach Jeffries,” Pough once said.
Fittingly, that quote came after he passed Jeffries on S.C. State’s all-time wins list on Oct. 19, 2019, with his 129th. He’s now up to 150 wins, with three outright conference titles, four more shared conference titles and two national championships of his own — about as close as one could come to reaching his former coach’s status.
How has Pough done it? Wednesday’s early morning practice at S.C. State’s football stadium offered some clues. Pough can’t get around like he used to on the field but offsets that quite well with an E-Z-GO golf cart.
He spent two hours crisscrossing the turf in a school-branded sweatsuit and skull cap, remaining detail-oriented and getting everything he could out of 21 practice periods with occasional sips from a McDonald’s coffee.
A coach overslept? Merge position group workouts until he arrives. A quarterback had an asthma attack earlier this week? Wheel over for a check-in. A post-play scuffle drags on too long? Pull the player to the side and be the voice of reason.
Fighting through a cold and a cough he’s certain he picked up last Saturday during a rainy home game vs. Morgan State, Pough checked in on every S.C. State position group at least once until a chilly practice wrapped around 8:45 a.m.
Amid Pough’s post-practice speech, an assistant coach told him one of the team’s lineman had a birthday. Ian Shark, a redshirt sophomore, was turning 21.
Pough brought him up to the front of the huddle at midfield: “Twenty-one … If I could be 21 again, I’d be right here where you are right now. Excited as all get out.”
‘All I’ve ever done is work’
But he’s not 21. He’s 70. And something about that number hit Pough hard, he told The State, when he celebrated his 70th birthday in May.
He insists that he’s “never had a day that I didn’t want to go to work” and backs that up in his day-to-day actions, from oversleeping for exactly one early practice in over a decade of holding them (something he still cringes at to this day) and every assignment that follows in a role that often extends past coaching X’s and O’s.
And he’s still the same refreshingly honest, often hilarious quote machine, delivering zingers about everything and everyone in the sport — himself included — while being regionally and nationally regarded as one of the good guys in college football at large by Dabo Swinney, Shane Beamer and dozens more of his peers.
Time caught up to Pough, though. He seriously considered retirement after S.C. State beat Jackson State in the 2021 Celebration Bowl, which has pitted the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) champion and Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) champion against each other in an Atlanta bowl game to formally decide the HBCU football national champion since 2015.
Jackson State, then coached by NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders, was the heavy favorite, but Pough’s team routed the Tigers 31-10 in front of nearly 50,000 fans in Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium on national television.
The Bulldogs were at the pinnacle of the sport.
“I thought about it,” Pough said. “But there were some things about our situation that I felt needed finishing up. So I came back.”
In a season Pough would describe as a “wake-up call,” S.C. State went 3-8 overall and 1-4 in MEAC play in 2022. This year his Bulldogs are 4-6 and 2-2 in the MEAC, with one game to go. Despite working in a building full of Celebration Bowl decor, Pough keeps few reminders of the championship in his office and acknowledged that S.C. State’s “been getting our asses kicked ever since. It’s time to move on.”
But even before a second sub-.500 season on the field — secured last week as SC State lost at home to Morgan State 20-17, scoring just one offensive touchdown — Pough was thinking about retiring after the 2023 season.
Hitting a milestone birthday pushed him over the finish line.
“That 70th birthday was a big day in my life,” he said. “At that point, I started really thinking if I’m ever gonna do anything else, as far as this kind of living is concerned.”
“All I’ve ever done is work. I had gotten to the point the last few years, I didn’t have time to really take a vacation. Even though I took a few days off, I didn’t really do anything, go anywhere. So I just felt like if I was going to do anything else in life besides work, then I needed to do it.”
Pough also said it became “a lot harder” over the last few years for him to remember the name of every player on his roster and other details that came easy in 2002, fresh off a four-year run as South Carolina’s running backs coach and sporting a recognizable mustache.
So, yes, he’s at peace with a deeply personal decision he announced to his team Aug. 24, ahead of S.C. State’s opener against Jackson State in the MEAC/SWAC Challenge.
Right?
What’s next for Buddy Pough?
Ask him in a month. Six months, maybe.
Not this week.
After Wednesday’s practice wrapped, Pough went home for a quick change — he lives about 10 minutes from campus in Orangeburg with his wife of nearly 47 years, Josie — and was back at it, clicking through that day’s offensive film from practice in his second floor office at Staley Hall.
He repeated the same process with his offensive coaches — Pough generally sits in on offensive and special team meetings but not defensive staff meetings — and offered plenty of tweaks and critiques before pivoting into a full staff meeting.
There was lots to plan for, much more than Saturday’s game against Norfolk State (3-7). S.C. State, with an overall athletic budget south of $9 million, doesn’t have the luxury of employing dozens of off-field football staffers like Clemson and South Carolina, who routinely spend tens of millions of dollars on football expenses alone.
As such, Pough and his smaller staff are intimately involved in the minute-by-minute details of game prep, such as who’s buying the juice and doughnuts for the team Saturday morning and where players can get taped by trainers pregame and the importance of everyone making it onto the team bus after the game — or else.
“They’ll get their ass on that bus,” Pough said, laughing. “When we pull off, we gone.”
“It’s been that way for 22 years,” assistant coach David Blanchard said.
“No doubt,” Pough said. “I’ve left some people. You can bet on that.”
The room cracked up, and on his walk back to his office minutes later, Pough stopped defensive assistant Chris Parrott in the hallway. He was wearing pink Kevin Durants.
“Those are the ugliest shoes I’ve seen,” Pough said.
More laughter.
Those moments, Pough said, are what he’ll miss: The “man in the arena” stuff.
Being cooped up in a dark room with his coaching buddies grinding away on film. Recruiting players as teenagers and watching them grow into young men. Seeing former players such as Darius Shaquille Leonard and Javon Hargrave and former staffers such as Tony Elliott and Billy Napier move onto bigger and better things as NFL players and Power Five head coaches.
But the stage of life ahead, once the season ends and a two-year contract paying him $287,000 annually expires Dec. 31, 2023, also intrigues him.
More time with his wife and his two adult sons and “two of the prettiest little grandbaby girls you have ever seen in your whole life.” Tickets to see his beloved Atlanta Braves play 20 or 30 times a year, more games than he’s ever been able to attend. Dusting off the golf clubs he hasn’t used in years.
Perhaps a more regular sleep schedule?
“I think I’ll try,” Pough said, laughing.
Even though he doesn’t want a formal job at S.C. State, Pough said he would like to stay involved as an ambassador at the university a la Jeffries and considers it “my life’s mission from this point” to raise enough money for S.C. State to build a new standalone facility for its football locker rooms and offices attached to the stadium.
And following a resignation earlier this month, he’s serving as the school’s interim athletic director, which could give him even more of a say in the school’s ongoing search for its next football coach. (Pough said there’s “a bunch of names out there” worth considering, including longtime friend Chennis Berry, who has the Columbia-based HBCU Benedict College rocking at the Division II level.)
All part of a new chapter for a legendary coach who, ahead of his last game, is ready to kick back and enjoy retirement after 22 seasons leading S.C. State.
Eventually.
“I don’t necessarily need to have to do something right away,” Pough said. “I need to probably try to maybe go at least for a couple months.”
Then he pulled into his parking spot.
It was time for another meeting.
This story was originally published November 16, 2023 at 8:59 AM.
