Glory Days: Upstate’s Top Football Moments 1980-2000

OK, let’s get this out of the way. We’re not claiming these are the 10 best single moments in high school football in our area from 1980 through 2000.

In fact, we don’t have many singular moments on this list. That’s because if you try to measure impact and legend and what mattered most to the most people, I’d just type “Rodney Woodruff to Brian Wofford,” and five percent of you would think I’m exactly right and the rest of you would be mad.

Now, make no mistake that’s on this list. But it’s part of a larger idea. All of these are. This list is centered around the moments in time that set football in Greenville, Spartanburg, and Cherokee (and Union and Laurens) counties apart in the last half-century or so. 

Read them with an open mind. Gauge how important they are to the overall landscape. Realize they’re largely one man’s opinion, with a little bit of input.

Then argue with me. And if you don’t get it all out of your system, we’ve got 25 more years to go in a couple weeks.

Woodruff cements its legacy

In 1980, Woodruff was already South Carolina high school football royalty. The Wolverines had seven state titles to their credit, including four straight from 1975-1978, and would win three more in the decade, including back-to-back crowns in the Tony Rice era in 1983 and 1984.

The 1980 state championship season, though, was unlike any other. To start with, the Wolverines had an early loss, falling to Dalton Rivers’ talented Broome squad. Then, they suffered a super-rare home October conference loss to Liberty, falling 19-13. Hall of Fame coach W.L Varner and his defensive staff went back to the drawing board, retooling some things on that side of the ball.

And nobody else the Wolverines played scored a point.

Read that again.

Woodruff finished the season with seven straight wins. That included a pair of conference victories, a win over Region II-4A Northwestern, and four straight playoff wins. Those came by an aggregate score of 218-0. 

Those seven shutouts, combined with two more earlier in the year, put the Wolverines’ points allowed at a paltry 4.6 points per game. It’s still one of the finest defensive seasons in state history.

Greer runs the table

There had been undefeated football teams in South Carolina history, sure. But until Greer walked off Irmo’s Hawkins Field in 1989 after a 13-7 victory over Aiken, there had never been a team finish 15-0.

The Yellow Jackets did it with an outstanding defense, allowing just 59 points in those 15 games. The team included legendary names like Reuben Wright and Nelson Welch, both Hall of Famers at the school, and put together a season for the ages. They allowed double-digits in a game exactly once, a 20-10 win over Broome. They never allowed two touchdowns in a single game. The Yellow Jackets notched six shutouts and put their mark on state history.

Northwestern 2, Gaffney 0

The 1993 4A Division I state championship was a war.

Gaffney beat Northwestern 13-12 in Week 10 of the regular season, a loss the Trojans seemed determined to avenge on the state’s biggest stage. At Clemson’s Memorial Stadium in a steady rain that threatened to turn to sleet, the defenses on both sides just beat each other up all day. 

Gaffney’s defense, led by Allen Davidson, Ty Byars, and Jeff Coleman, sacked Northwestern’s QB five times, kept the Trojans out of the end zone and off the scoreboard.

It was a day of “what might have been” for the Indians, though. A mishandled punt snap in their own end zone gave Northwestern a safety and the winning 2-0 margin. An early fourth down at the Northwestern 3-yard line came up agonizingly short. A go-ahead field goal try was blocked with just two minutes left.

It all added up to the lowest-scoring state championship in history, the nationally-ranked Indians first loss in 18 games, and a historical oddity: Gaffney lost the second-lowest scoring state title game five years before, falling 3-0 to Spring Valley. The Indians claim 18 state titles. They’re two plays away from 20.

The Rise of Doc Davis

Chapman was terrible in 1985. Then they got worse.

Through attrition and injuries, the Panthers sometimes had barely enough players to practice, and finished 0-10, including losses of 77-0 and 62-0 along the way.

Three seasons later, they were one play away from an Upper State championship.

A lot of things get a share of the credit for that turnaround. Attendance falling for the Panthers to be one of the biggest teams in 2A instead of the smallest in 3A helped a little. Players like Anthony Smith, Toby Cates, Greg Powell, and a bunch of guys who were invested in success helped a lot. But at the helm was Davis, the no-nonsense, no-excuses coach who set the bar and the standard of success for a run at Chapman that went well beyond his time there. Which leads us to…

Spartanburg’s Historic Run

Davis’ second job was at Spartanburg, where he’d stay for 18 seasons, winning five championships along the way. The first would come in 1991, on the back of All-American RB Steve Davis, QB Brian Smith, and a stout defense. That set the tone for one of the best runs the state has ever seen. 

In South Carolina’s biggest division, in the toughest region in the state, playing top-flight programs week in and week out, the Vikings were undefeated from the start of the season in 1994 through Week 7 of 1996, a span of 37 games. Three more titles followed in the run, and the program turned out players who would go on to legendary status, including LB Anthony Simmons, who many consider among the best defenders to ever play in the state.

In the Vikings’ historic run, several of their tightest contests were against cross-town rival Dorman. That’s because…

Dale Evans hires Dave Gutshall

How does a wine salesman turn into one of the most successful high school football coaches in the Carolinas?

Easily, it would seem.

Gutshall’s first win at Madison Mayodan high school in North Carolina broke the state’s longest losing streak and saw him carried off the field by his players. He won more than 400 after that, including an unprecedented level of success at Dorman. He innovated the spread offense at the high school level, but often abandoned it for a power run game, depending upon the Cavaliers’ personnel and talent. 

Gutshall won state titles at Dorman in 2000 and 2009 and played for the title in 1999, 2010, 2015, 2017, and 2019. That 2000 win needs to be discussed before we move on.

Lexington led 24-0. It was nearly nap time with the game on TV. Then Dorman scored, and kept scoring. The Cavaliers scored three unanswered touchdowns, capped those drives with three straight (and unique) two-point conversions, and then scored one more time on a 15-yard run with seven seconds to play to cap a wild 31-0 run that gave them their first state title in improbable fashion.

Spartanburg 31, Dorman 30

The Catch (The Throw? The Kick?). Any can apply. They’re all important. But at the end of things, what happened is this. 

Dorman was nursing a 30-24 lead in the game’s final seconds at Dorman’s John L. Martin Stadium in 1994, thanks to a late pass from Derek Burnette to Mickey Gist. Anthony Simmons (see, there’s that name again) partially blocked the extra point attempt, and a pooch kick that went out of bounds gave Spartanburg a last gasp at their own 35. Two medium-gain plays put it at the Dorman 39.

Seven seconds to play. Rodney Woodruff slung it into the end zone.

Years later, Brian Wofford and I went to Wal-Mart on Spartanburg’s west side, and given an aerial map of the site of Dorman’s former campus, we estimated the point where he caught the legendary ball. I asked him how high he’d had to jump. He moved his hands about six inches apart.

“I only jumped so I could be sure Dorman couldn’t get it,” he told me. “They mistimed it, and it was all mine.”

Then Brian McClure trotted on to the field, knocked in the extra point, and broke Dorman’s heart. 

The game had a little bit of everything. Gist ran wild, and caught two touchdowns and had 187 receiving yards out of the backfield. Wofford hadn’t caught a touchdown pass in seven games, but had three IN THE SECOND HALF. The Hail Mary answered Dorman’s on version of that play, the Cavaliers’ third-ever win in the series. It also set the stage for the rematch, a 24-17 Spartanburg win in that season’s 4A Division I championship at Clemson.

The Big 16 is established

There’s not much that’s done more to establish Upstate football dominance than the Big 16. Small schools have had runs throughout the time period we’re talking about, but if you’re focusing on 1980-2000, the Big 16 IS the story.

In short, the South Carolina High School League, in order to combat a have/have not situation developing in the state’s biggest classification, elected to split 4A into “Big 16” and “Little 32” for football, the sport where increased participation and revenue largely means the most. The biggest 16 schools in the state by enrollment were grouped together for the playoffs, meaning that cross-bracketing and a points system was utilized to establish matchups. The idea was to level the playing field, after a fashion.

What happened is this: the “traditional” Region II-4A took over. That includes some heavyweights. The original makeup of the region was some combination of Boiling Springs, Dorman, Spartanburg, Gaffney, Rock Hill, and Northwestern, along with rotating members including Boiling Springs, Byrnes, Chester, and Union depending upon geography needs and enrollment numbers. But let’s just take that big five of Dorman, Spartanburg, Gaffney, Rock Hill, and Northwestern.

From 1981 through 2000, those schools won 10 state titles. One of them played for the championship every single season in that time frame. Four times, they played each other.

With Byrnes’ rise to Division I early in the 2000s, the dominance grew even more pronounced. But the first two decades of division clearly set the Upstate apart.

Cardiac Raiders win title

It’s not in the Greenville-Spartanburg-Cherokee area, but what Laurens did in their final two games in 1991 absolutely deserves a mention.

The Upper State championship matched a pair of legendary figures connected to the Woodruff program, with Bobby Ivey’s Raiders taking on Union and Shell Dula. An overflow crowd (people were standing 10 deep on the track) saw the teams battle to a 7-7 tie, and Union score on their first overtime possession to make it 14-7.

The Yellow Jackets forced Laurens into a fourth down, but Ronnie Cain found Reggie Cunningham for a TD, and Laurens was poised to tie it with an extra point.

Then, a lot of things happened at once. Union’s all-everything Monty Means leaned into the neutral zone and drew a flag. Laurens NG Cecil Gilliam started screaming for Ivey to end it. Ivey pulled the trigger, pulled the kicking team off the field, and called a play called Wishbone 44 Double, with Gilliam and Eric Sullivan leading the RB into the end zone for a 15-14 win.

That made the next week almost boring by comparison. All the Raiders did then was to rally to within 27-21 with two minutes left and score with no time left on the clock on a pass from Cain to Charles Peterson. This time, Stan Whitlock got to make his pressure kick and win the state title 28-27 over Lower Richland.

Roscoe

That’s it. That’s all I need to type. And the fact that you know exactly what I mean from that one word is proof.

Roscoe Crosby was one of the most electric players to step on a South Carolina football field (and baseball diamond, for that matter). He was an elite receiver and an elite return guy, and he helped lead the Yellow Jackets to state championships in 1999 and 2000. He was the No. 1 WR recruit in the nation according to rivals.com, was a Parade and USA Today All-American, and had more than 3,000 receiving yards and 49 touchdowns in his junior and senior seasons combined. 

And football was probably his second-best sport.