A look back at South Carolina-Florida classic that set up current Gamecocks program
Standing on the sideline in Florida’s Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in November of 2014, South Carolina kicker Elliott Fry was about as nervous as he’d ever been in his career. And that was before his team called on him in a big moment.
“Me and (Patrick Fish) talked about that later that year,” Fry said. “I remember him even talking about like, ‘That was the most nervous I’ve ever been to hold.’”
On the other sideline, Will Muschamp had seen a focusing of his resources backfire in a big way. He’d made the choice South Carolina receiver Pharoh Cooper wouldn’t beat his Gators, but that plan let a little known Gamecock play hero.
“I never knew something so simple as a block could change so much in college football,” Gamecocks receiver Carlton Heard said.
Two years later, Muschamp was telling a USC pass rusher who had wrecked his offense he was pleased the player picked the Gamecocks over Florida because of where life took him. That moment was in many ways set up by the game played five years ago in Gainesville.
That was a battle between football teams with nine combined losses in mid-November. Neither side was happy. Both teams were set for drastic changes in the near future. And yet two teams hovering around .500 played a classic of a game that ended up shifting so much on each side.
The preamble
Then-defensive end Bryson Allen-Williams remembered how things simply had not gone South Carolina’s way that season. A preseason top-10 team, one that was supposed to make another jump, opened with a blowout loss to Texas A&M.
The Gamecocks rallied, but then lost four of five with defeats to Kentucky and a bad Tennessee squad mixed in.
Allen-Williams said there was an understanding of what might well hang in the balance that afternoon.
“We kind of didn’t have the season that we wanted to have,” Allen-Williams said. “That was a game we needed, one of the wins we needed to get bowl eligible.”
The 4-5 Gamecocks had a layup coming in South Alabama, but a defeat to the Gators would have made Clemson must-win to even go bowling (the Tigers were in a good place with a freshman quarterback named Deshaun Watson).
“That was the first time that you know, we struggled in a while,” Fry said. “We had been 11-2 the last several years. And we were struggling and lost some games.”
Will Muschamp wasn’t doing so hot either.
The fourth-year Gator coach had produced an 11-win squad in his second season, but after that, everything fell apart. UF went 4-8 in 2013, with seemingly every quarterback getting hurt.
That campaign had a tight Kentucky win early, and then losses to SEC contenders LSU and Alabama. Missouri blew them out despite a 2-to-1 yardage advantage, but a surprise win against Georgia, plus a date with Vanderbilt had UF at least at 5-3.
But according to then-Florida defensive line coach Brad Lawing, a longtime member of several Gamecocks staffs, that never seeped into the staff’s thinking.
“Will was always positive,” Lawing said, pointing out the LSU game had come down to a play right at the end. “We still had a chance to win the east. We really did, from what I rememeber. He was positive. He’s intense. He never, us as coaches, made us feel like there’s more than just a ballgame on the line every week.”
Coming off the Urban Meyer era, the Gators’ expectations were higher than that. The offense had never come around at a school where offense is the expectation. His seat was plenty hot.
At the time, the Gamecocks players didn’t know that. Some knew Muschamp from their days recruiting, but they didn’t know what they might be able to do on one afternoon.
The grinder of a game
The boxscore wasn’t pretty for those who feel affection for teams moving the ball.
South Carolina’s average pass attempt gained 4.9 yards, while Florida’s gained 5.5 (the Gators only threw 11 times). USC’s average rush went 2.5 yards, while Florida’s went 4.4, with more than half the yards coming from the quarterback.
“At that time, Florida had (running back) Matt Jones, I know they had (running back Mack Brown),” Allen-Williams said. “They had a big offensive line, you know, just all across the board they were just a solid team.”
It was fully in the Gators’ wheelhouse, and an outlier for a Gamecocks team that was rough on defense and strong offensively (it was South Carolina’s worst offensive day and third-best game on defense).
USC had a pair of running backs who got shots in the NFL, plus a quarterback, wide receiver and most of the offensive line. Florida had an army of future pros, though not as many on the offensive side.
South Carolina ran out to a 10-0 lead 13 minutes in. The Gators rallied to tie it, and after Fry missed from 47 yards in the latter half of the third, the Gators mounted a 10-play, 71-yard march for a Matt Jones touchdown run.
Then the Gamecocks had four consecutive scoreless drives, including a fumble. The Gators had a 32-yard field goal attempt to go up by double digits with 3:08 to go, but Gerald Dixon Jr. got a big mitt up to swat it away (the play still irks Muschamp).
A missed snap on fourth down and desperation heave from South Carolina QB Dylan Thompson gave the ball back to Florida on its own 41 with 2:22 left on the clock.
That’s not 100 percent finished, but it’s almost as done as a game can be. Florida was looking at moving to 6-3, while the Gamecocks’ bowl hopes were on the ropes.
The block and everything else
Allen-Williams takes credit for setting up Heard’s heroics.
After the fourth-down miss, USC held the Gators to gains of 5 and 2 yards. Florida OC Kurt Roper called a power read run. The quarterback kept the ball, and Allen-Williams, who as a recruit got his USC and UF offers the same day, did his thing.
“It was third and short,” Allen-Williams said. “They did a read option play with Treon Harris. I got the tackle for loss.”
Allen Williams, whose 2 1/2 tackles went for loss with a forced fumble, tripped up Harris 5 yards behind the line, and the clock ticked down to 46 seconds.
Then Muschamp, concerned about kicking the ball to one of the SEC’s most explosive playmakers, made a fateful choice.
“You got a guy like Pharoh back there returning,” Muschamp said. “And we felt like we needed to get in some sort of coverage unit situation knowing that they were going to sell out for the block.”
On the other side, Allen-Williams had his own mission: Get Carlton Heard a lane.
“We had coach Joe Robinson and his scheme was a little bit different,” Allen-Williams, part of that punt block group, said. “He told all us, if you’re on the team, if you’re not the main primary block guy, you’re just basically burying your ma. You’re going to rush as hard as you can at your man and just try to get pressure into the punter’s face.
“Everybody just tried to open it up for Carlton.”
Heard was a former walk-on wide receiver who earned a scholarship before the season. He’d started his career at Gardner-Webb before transferring. He’d not caught a pass that season, and went on to catch only five balls in his career.
But that day, he earned a spot in Gamecocks lore.
“I remember just being in the huddle, everybody just like ‘Let’s go and get it! Let’s go and get it!’” Heard said. “An opening opened up, I ran straight through, dove as far as I could.
“Right at that moment, when they slid to that level, it kind of opened me up free. That’s when I knew it was my moment.”
South Carolina rushed nine to the six Gators protecting the punter. Heard launched in just about untouched. He dove, and by most TV angles it looked like he came in to the side of the ball. But the final one showed how he smothered it, launching off the ground and then the punter’s helmet.
“You really don’t see it,” Allen-Williams said. “All you can do is hear the block, and once you heard the block, everybody just starts searching for the ball.
“Reliving that moment, it was kind of surreal.”
The Gamecocks still needed a touchdown in 39 seconds, but only needed 27, somehow managing to run five plays in that span. A busted play ended with a 27-yard Mike Davis catch and run. On second and goal from the 2, Steve Spurrier went a little aggressive, calling a speed option that almost went awry.
Davis badly bobbled and dropped Thompson’s pitch, but he fell on it in the end zone. All that was left was Fry sending it to overtime.
He admitted he was so caught up with watching the punt block and offensive drive, it took a second to hit that he was about to play a role with it.
“As a kicker, you’re looking at, ‘Okay, we gotta, we might have a field goal here and there was so little time left, you know, it’s always like, you never really prepare to block a punt and then get back down and then it’s a like, it all happened so fast. That was like, oh wow. We’re here.
“In a span of 20 seconds, we’ve got to tie this thing up. So to be honest, that was one of my, to be honest, most nerve-wracking kicks.”
After that make, Fry, who ended up the leading scorer in South Carolina history, steeled himself for the potential of kicking a game-winner, a chance to make up for missing earlier. He didn’t even have to.
The Gators couldn’t gain a first down and settled for a field goal in overtime, and then Spurrier’s offense, now just pounding away, went to work.
Davis carried the ball four times. Thompson hit Cooper on a little swing pass and David Williams plunged ahead to convert a third and 2.
On first and goal from the Florida 4, Thompson capped his least statistically productive day of the season with a sprint to the pylon, his final throw of the day (heaving the ball into the stands in celebration) and the victory.
Allen-Williams recalled hearing the garnet-clad fans cheer louder than the hosts as he sprinted onto the field. Fry was ready to go out for redemption from his earlier miss, and instead felt the wave of excitement realizing it wasn’t needed.
Muschamp, well something else stuck in his mind.
“Not taking the quarterback, Dylan Thompson, on a freaking zone read,” Muschamp said. “How about that? Seeing him run in the end zone.”
How strange it is the way things end up
A few years later, Heard found himself on the sideline of South Carolina’s practice field. In the past five years, he’s not spoken to Will Muschamp about the play.
“I came by practice and they ... were kind of telling him, there’s the guy that blocked the kick,” said Heard, who is now assistant director of creative media for football at Auburn. “It was just a little fun time, there wasn’t no hard feelings or anything.”
The day after Heard’s block, Muschamp was fired. He’d come to Gainesville as the hottest name in coaching, went from a locker room rebuild to 11 wins in one season and now was done after four years.
The way he broke it to his staff was classic Muschamp.
“Will called a meeting on Sunday morning,” Lawing said. “He said, ‘Guys, I got some news. They’re going to go in a different direction at Florida. It’s going to make it hard to recruit with where we are right now.’”
Lawing remembers sitting in a hotel with the mother of future first-round draft pick Mike Hughes, who was on an official visit weekend. She’d flown in on her own dime, and as he saw her looking at he phone and had to get out ahead of it.
Muschamp was reportedly in the mix to be hired as South Carolina’s defensive coordinator, but it didn’t come to pass. After one season at Auburn, he was tabbed with replacing Steve Spurrier, whose run to a bowl win that year was one of the last highlights.
This week, wearing a striped, gray, Carolina polo shirt one month short of the five-year anniversary of the game, he still thought about the little things.
“We got a punt blocked,” Muschamp said. “I appreciate your bringing it up. No, you know, had a punt blocked, had a field goal blocked there. In the situation, it’s amazing, we talk about situational football all the time.”
He went on to recall the little details of that punt, the approach, the thought process.
The Gamecocks who beat him said in their time, that afternoon never came up.
Allen-Williams said in the moments after the game, he was glad he picked USC instead of Florida. Two years later, Muschamp joked he was glad Allen-Williams made his choice with how things worked out. Fry said he didn’t think much of Muschamp’s precarious situation until after the game, and the connection didn’t come up until much later. Fry ended up hitting a 55-yard kick to give Muschamp a win in his first game at USC.
“Looking at it at the time, you never realize that he’s going to lose his job there and then two years later end up as your coach,” Fry said. “End up having a really good relationship with him then.
“It’s kind of crazy how it works.”
This story was originally published October 17, 2019 at 12:00 AM.
