Carlson’s Gator Tales: Carolina On Their Minds
Thursday, November 13, 2014 | Football
By Norm Carlson
Assistant Athletics Director/Gator Historian
When head coach/athletic director G.E. Pyle decided to move Florida football to upgraded schedules beginning in 1911, the first school he contacted was the University of South Carolina. The first game was held in Columbia on October 21.
Before that season, the newly-nicknamed Gators faced opposition like the Gainesville Guards, Olympic Club of Jacksonville, Tallahassee Athletic Club, Gainesville Athletic Association and so forth. Thrown in were the traditional rivals like Rollins, Stetson and Mercer.
Against that lineup, Florida was 26-8-3 from 1906 through 1910. The Gamecocks (that was their nickname from the start) represented a big challenge in this new concept of playing more major state university teams. The 1910 USC team won the state championship of South Carolina by beating Clemson and was favored to repeat in 1911.
That first game between the two schools ended in a 6-6 tie, the first of three ties in the series. Earle (Dummy) Taylor ran 45 yards for a touchdown early in the game but missed the extra point and the Gamecocks came back to score late in the game and also missed the extra point.
Oddly enough, the Gators played four of their six games that season against teams from the Palmetto State and finished 3-0-1 against USC, Clemson, Citadel and the College of Charleston on their way to a 5-0-1 record. The Citadel agreed to play in Gainesville, Charleston was a Jacksonville contest.
The Gators remained in South Carolina after the opening tie, playing Clemson four days later and winning, 6-5, before hopping back on the train to Gainesville.
Florida added Auburn, Georgia and Georgia Tech to the schedule in the next few years, an admirable effort by Coach/A.D. Pyle, but the record went south and he was fired after losses to the Tigers (55-0), Tech (13-0) and South Carolina (13-0) in 1913.
By the end of the 1939 season, Florida and South Carolina had played 11 times and the Gators led in the series, 5-3-3. Two of the three ties were in Tampa. The Gamecocks owned a two-game winning streak including a 7-0 triumph in 1936 and a 6-0 win in 1939. Both games were in Columbia.
Those were the last two games the Gamecocks had won in this series until a 30-22 victory in 2005. Florida now leads, 24-7-3, with 16 wins in 17 encounters from 1964-2009. The Gator streak started with a 37-0 pounding of USC on Homecoming Day in front of 43,000 fans at Florida Field in 1964. The Florida quarterback that day was sophomore Steve Spurrier and Dan Reaves was the QB for USC. As Florida's head coach, Spurrier was 12-0 against the Gamecocks. Florida leads 13-1 in Gainesville, 10-6-1 in Columbia and 1-0-2 in Tampa.
