Part I: A conversation with Sparky Woods
A two-part series - Former Gamecock football coach reflects on his time in Columbia and a life in football
The voice came through my phone like a warm embrace from the early 90’s. Sparky Woods’ gentlemanly East Tennessee drawl and easy manner belies a life spent playing and coaching in the rough-and-tumble world of college football.
On-brand as ever, Woods was unassuming and humble. He began the conversation by actually apologizing to me for not reaching out sooner to tell me he enjoyed my book, which covers, in part, his early tenure at USC. I had passed a copy of it to him through one of his neighbors and a mutual friend during his time in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, not thinking much of it beyond that.
“Thanks, Coach, and no worries. You’ve been pretty busy.”
Indeed, Woods has been busy wrapping up a career in college football that spanned a half-century as a player and coach. He also recently relocated from his final career stop in Chapel Hill, to a new home in Alabama.
Gamecock fans remember Woods as the man who led the University of South Carolina’s football program into the mighty Southeastern Conference in 1992. His tenure, along with that of his successor, Brad Scott, was a bridge of sorts between the wildly entertaining - if often troubling - tenures of independent-era coaches Jim Carlen and Joe Morrison, to stability, eventual competitiveness, then unprecedented success in the SEC under coaching legends Lou Holtz and Steve Spurrier.
Before coming to Columbia, Woods enjoyed an outstanding five-year run in his initial head coaching opportunity, leading one-time Division I-AA powerhouse Appalachian State to two Southern Conference championships, while earning three SoCon Coach of the Year recognitions between 1984 and 1988.
Woods was familiar with the South Carolina program - his Mountaineers played Morrison’s Gamecocks three times during those years, resulting in three South Carolina wins. He remembers Morrison fondly, saying, “Coach Morrison was great to me.” Woods also knew of South Carolina’s institutional troubles during the latter Morrison era.
“I knew about the steroid deal. I was 35 when this [opening] came about. I know at that age I was probably not nearly as prepared as I thought I would be, but you know, at that age, I thought I better grab this opportunity while I can. But I was smart enough to know that was not the best time to take this job. The next time it comes open would be the best time, but I felt blessed to have an opportunity to coach there.“
Upon hearing of Morrison’s death in February, 1989, Woods, like many others, thought NC State head coach Dick Sheridan would be the natural fit at South Carolina. “I thought, you know what’s going to happen is they’re going to hire Dick Sheridan, and I might have a chance to go to NC State,” Woods recalls.
Sheridan, an Augusta native and USC grad, led Furman to a Division II national title game in 1985 before revitalizing the Wolfpack program in short order starting in 1986. Many believed Sheridan harbored a desire to return to his alma mater as head coach, and he was the sole target of USC athletics director King Dixon in the early days of the search.
Dixon reportedly offered Sheridan the job during a meeting on February 12, just eight days following Morrison’s death. By Thursday of that week, Sheridan pulled his name from consideration to the surprise of many, opting instead to remain with NC State where he coached through the 1992 season.
With Sheridan out of the running, Furman’s Jimmy Satterfield and Air Force’s Fisher DeBerry rose to the top of media speculation for the Gamecock opening. Satterfield, a USC grad who replaced Sheridan at Furman, had just wrapped up a Division I-AA national championship with the Palidans. DeBerry, a Cheraw native and former coach of Wofford had compiled a 40-21 record in five seasons at the Air Force Academy, including a 12-1 finish in 1985.
Woods, with his 39-19-2 record at Appalachian State, had also entered the conversation.
Ultimately, Dixon chose Woods, who became the twenty-eighth head football coach at the University of South Carolina. The thirty-five-year-old native of Oneida, Tennessee, fit the profile Dixon had in mind. He was young and successful, with a squeaky-clean image and an engaging, affable presence with fans and media.
A promising start
The 1989 Gamecocks included much of the talent of Morrison’s final squad, including program stalwarts, quarterback Todd Ellis, running back Harold Green, and sophomore phenom, receiver Robert Brooks on the offensive side of the ball. Patrick Hinton, Corey Miller and Scott Windsor headlined the defense, while dependable placekicker Colin Mackie also returned.
Carolina jumped out to a 5-1-1 record, including a cathartic 21-10 defeat of Georgia Tech at home, just two days after Hurricane Hugo ravaged the Palmetto State. A 24-10 road upset of #23-ranked Georgia in Athens followed a week later, propelling Woods program into its first top-25 ranking, at number 24.1
October 28, 1989 marked the untimely end of one of the most brilliant careers in the history of South Carolina football. The number 24-ranked Gamecocks took on old rival, 20th-ranked NC State in Columbia before a season-best crowd of 74,248. On the third play from scrimmage, Gamecock quarterback Ellis was hit by Wolfpack linebacker Mark Thomas on third-and-seven from the NC State thirty-yard-line. Ellis, slumped on the ground and clearly in pain, tried briefly to get up before falling backward, grasping his left knee.
Reports from the locker room confirmed the worst - Ellis was lost for the season with a torn medial collateral ligament. The Gamecocks’ senior leader, all-time winningest quarterback, and holder of nearly every passing record in program history, had played his final down in garnet and black.
Dickie DeMasi, a seldom-used junior from Irmo, finished out the game and the season behind center for the Gamecocks. Despite earning second-string status coming out of fall camp, coaches had planned to redshirt DeMasi with durable veteran Ellis at the helm. It all changed in one play, and DeMasi was pressed into action. Despite best efforts, the Gamecocks seemed dazed following Ellis’ injury, and the Wolfpack walked away with a 20-10 win in another notable matchup between the two former ACC rivals.
The Gamecocks lost next to 6th-ranked FSU in Tallahassee, then won in Chapel Hill versus a hapless North Carolina team, before losing in humiliating fashion at home to number 15 Clemson (45-0) to end the regular season. After a promising start, Carolina ended 6-4-1. Good enough for a bowl bid, though the university declined the opportunity, deciding to stress academics over postseason play in an effort to clean up the program’s outlaw image.
Woods remembers the bowl decision as an unfortunate one.
“The Independence Bowl called and offered us a chance to come there. Grant Taft was at Baylor and Grant called me and tried to get me to come. He said ‘they’re gonna take you and us,’ and we probably could have beat Baylor at the time. South Carolina had only been to eight bowl games in the history of the school and never won one. So I should have pushed for that. It fell during exams, and [President] Holderman felt like, first of all, we’d probably lose money going to the Independence Bowl. I thought I was being a team guy, and I really wasn’t. It was really not fair to the players - the seniors especially.”
An eventful start to a new decade
Similar circumstances unfolded a year later, from Carolina’s ACC-heavy schedule and end-of-year win total, to another unsatisfying bowl scenario. But 1990 will always be remembered for the tectonic shifting of conference realignment - a movement that presaged greater shifts to come across the college landscape. Sparky Woods and the University of South Carolina found themselves in the thick of it all.
The 1990 Gamecocks again started well, dispatching Duke and UNC in Columbia, then defeating Virginia Tech on the road. Bobby Fuller, a former Gamecock quarterback, recalled a humorous moment from the Tech game.
Fuller was a transfer quarterback who followed Woods down from Appalachian State and started for the Gamecocks in 1990 and ‘91 after sitting out a year as required by NCAA rules then in place. During pregame warmups in Blacksburg, Fuller let fly an errant pass, hitting a Virginia Tech ball boy. That 13-year-old ball boy was none other than Virginia Tech Coach Frank Beamer’s son, Shane, now the fifth-year coach at South Carolina. Beamer reminded Fuller of the incident during a players reunion before the 2025 spring game. “He’s a funny dude,” Fuller recalls, “he came up and was telling me a story that I pegged him with a ball during warmups when he was a little kid ball boy,” adding with a laugh, “I didn’t even remember that.”
The 3-0 start pushed the Gamecocks into the top-25 (#25) for the second time in Woods’ tenure ahead of a road trip to Georgia Tech.
The following week was a historic one for USC. A high-stakes game of musical chairs had developed between the University of South Carolina, Florida State University, and the University of Miami - all major independent schools eager for invitations to the ACC or the SEC and the financial stability of major conference affiliation. The three schools waited for two coveted invitations - one from each conference.
Woods recalls his thinking around conference expansion at the time,
“I thought we’d get back in the ACC. I thought it made the most sense for us to go to the ACC and Florida [State] to go to the SEC. I thought, you know, we had a proud tradition in basketball, with [Coach] McGuire and all that. It just makes sense that North Carolina and South Carolina play each other.”
It’s hard to imagine for USC fans now, but Woods’ thoughts on the matter were shared by a distinct majority of Gamecock faithful in 1990. In May of that year, Bob Gillespie of The State suggested several potential paths for USC to attain conference affiliation. They included the ACC, the SEC, an expanded Metro Conference (USC’s conference home for all sports but football since 1983) which would include football; and intriguingly, the Eastern Seaboard Conference - a new conference model first proposed by Penn State’s Joe Paterno, which proposed a confederation of major independent football schools, including Penn State, West Virginia, Virginia Tech, Florida State, Miami, and South Carolina.
A State reader poll published two days later revealed a strong fan preference for the ACC, which garnered 62.2 percent of votes. The SEC was a distant second at 24.6 percent. Fans largely dismissed the Eastern Seaboard proposal (4.3 percent), with the Metro option barely registering.
By June, Penn State received an invitation to join the Big Ten, essentially ending any further talk of the Eastern Seaboard proposal. The financials for an expanded Metro never made sense on paper, and USC athletics director Dixon told reporters, “Frankly, a lot of our fans aren’t going to be intrigued with a home-and-home series with some of the [Metro] schools. There’s nothing wrong with them, but there’s no rivalry or relationship.”
After a summer filled with intrigue and no small amount of anxiety in Columbia, it was clear that South Carolina’s best hopes for a future conference home were tied to a return to its old conference home, the ACC, or a new path forward with the SEC. While nobody wanted to think about less desirable outcomes, it was by no means a given that USC would receive an invitation from either conference.
On Friday, September 14 the ACC made its move, inviting Florida State. Before FSU could formally accept, SEC presidents voted by teleconference in an odd, hastily assembled meeting not to invite the Seminoles.
Speculation then shifted to whether the Gamecocks or Hurricanes would receive the final SEC invitation.2 By Saturday, Sept 22, the day of Carolina’s road win in Blacksburg, rumors out of Coral Gables indicated that Miami would pursue membership in an expanding Big East Conference.
That day also marked the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Hugo’s devastating rampage across South Carolina. Amid an ongoing recovery from literal and figurative storms across the state and within the USC athletics program, the win in Blacksburg was a harbinger of better days to come.
On Tuesday, September 25, the University of South Carolina received its long-coveted invitation to membership in the Southeastern Conference, marking the beginning of the end of its long wilderness path of independent status.3
SEC invitation in hand, the #25-ranked Gamecocks suffered their first loss on the season, a 27-6 setback to that season’s eventual national champion Georgia Tech at Grant Field in Atlanta.4
A home win over East Carolina next pushed the Gamecocks’ early-season record to 4-1 before disaster struck in the form of a 38-35 home loss to I-AA The Citadel on October 20. The game figured to be a tuneup for the Gamecocks ahead of the annual grudge match versus NC State the following week, but the Bulldogs had other plans.
On the strength of a one-yard go-ahead touchdown run on fourth down by Bulldog quarterback Jack Douglas with 22 seconds remaining, The Citadel shocked Gamecock fans and scouts in attendance from the Citrus, Gator, and Peach Bowls. It was the Bulldogs’ first win versus South Carolina since 1950, and its first win in Columbia since 1919.
The Citadel loss hung like a pall over the remainder of the 1990 season, as defeats began to pile up, to NC State, #12 FSU, and #17 Clemson, interspersed only be a home win over non-major Southern Illinois.
Carolina found itself knotted at 5-5 ahead of a rare regular-season game after Clemson, in the form of a home matchup on Thanksgiving night versus West Virginia. It was a Mountaineer program that had played for a national championship just two years earlier under longtime coach Don Nehlen, but which limped into Columbia at 4-6, looking to close the season on a positive note.
Avenging a lopsided loss in Morgantown a year prior, the Gamecocks assembled their most balanced offensive attack of the season behind the passing of quarterback Fuller and the one-two punch of running backs, senior Mike Dingle and freshman Rob DeBoer. A two-sport star out of Omaha, Nebraska, DeBoer also played catcher for June Raines’ baseball Gamecocks during his four-year career.
It was the freshman in particular who delighted the crowd of 64,251. Shuttled into the lineup after Dingle suffered a separated shoulder in the third quarter, DeBoer rumbled like a young Brahma bull for 98 yards, dragging would-be Mountaineer tacklers for extra yards in a characteristically workmanlike performance that made him a fan favorite during his career. Senior placekicker Colin Mackie contributed a program record five field goals en route to a convincing 29-10 Gamecock win.
Despite the good feelings following a nationally-televised victory and another six-win season, administrators once again declined an invitation to the Independence Bowl.
Reflecting on the reasoning behind USC’s decision, Woods says,
“Same thing. Independence Bowl, and [we were] gonna get Baylor again,” Woods recalls. “I think it was the money (a reference to the cost of travel to the low-paying bowl). We also got a lot of negative publicity about a 19% graduation rate; we were on indefinite [NCAA] probation,” Woods reflects. “I wish I had fought for the opportunity to go to one of those bowl games. It would have been the right thing to do for those kids, and who knows, I think we might have won one of those. That was a huge mistake, maybe one of the biggest that we made while we were there.”
Woods recalls a 1989 conversation with Roy Kramer, then the Vanderbilt athletics director and a member of the NCAA’s committee on infractions.5 “I remember him saying to me, ‘Son, we know you’re gonna mess up again, and we don’t want to give you the death penalty.’” It was a reference to the unprecedented penalties imposed by the NCAA upon the Southern Methodist (SMU) football program in 1987 for an array of recurring recruiting violations. The penalties forced cancellation of SMU’s 1987 season, and cancelled all home games for the 1988 season. The penalties devastated the Dallas-based program, taking it decades to recover.6
Despite the bowl disappointment, Woods was building on the momentum from Morrison’s final two seasons, achieving the program’s first streak of four-straight winning seasons since Coach Billy Laval led six winners in a row between 1928 and 1933.
Moreover, Woods was retooling the program in his own image. Gone was the “Wild West” environment of the Morrison era. Woods was determined to prove Roy Kramer wrong - the Gamecocks wouldn’t “mess up again” as long as he strolled the sidelines of Williams-Brice Stadium.
Ironically it was Kramer in his new role of SEC Commissioner who, by the fall of 1990, felt enough confidence in the direction of the University of South Carolina - most significantly its football program under the leadership of Sparky Woods - to extend an invitation to the greatest athletics conference in all of college sports.
After a frustrating 1991 season during which the Gamecocks played spirited football but struggled to a disappointing 3-6-2 record in its final season as a major independent, Woods prepared to lead his program into the vaunted Southeastern Conference.
Coming soon in Part II, Woods reflects on the challenges and rewards of leading the South Carolina program, and navigating the rugged Southeastern Conference
The 1989 Gamecock football schedule was laden with current and soon-to-be ACC programs - a total of seven, including Duke, Georgia Tech, NC State, North Carolina, and Clemson - all members in ‘89, as well as Florida State and Virginia Tech, who joined the ACC in 1991 and 2004 respectively. Carolina’s win over future SEC rival Georgia, meanwhile, marked the final meeting between those longtime border rivals during Carolina’s pre-SEC era. With the exception of three seasons (1965, 1972, and 1973), the Gamecocks and Bulldogs met annually between 1958 and 1989.
The University of Arkansas, previously of the Southwest Conference, accepted an invitation to join the SEC on August 1, 1990, becoming the 11th SEC member school.
USC, along with Arkansas, officially became members of the SEC on July 1, 1991. SEC competition began with the 1991-92 basketball season, with 1992 marking the first year of conference competition for football.
Long before a playoff format evolved, the Yellow Jackets won a share of the 1990 NCAA football championship after defeating Nebraska in the Citrus Bowl. Colorado ended the season ranked #1 in the Associated Press poll, securing their first national championship, while Tech finished #1 by a point in the United Press International (UPI) coaches’ poll. The deciding vote in the UPI poll was Tom Osbourne, coach of Colorado rival Nebraska. The Cornhuskers were the only team that played both Colorado and Georgia Tech that season.
Kramer took over as SEC commissioner in 1990, famously leading the conference in its expansion to twelve institutions divided into two six-team divisions. Kramer further revolutionized college football with the advent of the SEC championship game, starting in 1992. Other major conferences quickly followed suit.
SMU didn’t play in a bowl game for 35 years after the NCAA-imposed death penalty. Better days have arrived for the Mustangs, who joined the ACC in 2024. Woods son, Casey Woods, is the Offensive Coordinator and tight ends coach for the Mustangs under fourth-year head coach Rhett Lashee.
I was in Columbia on Hugo related work, and driving past Longstreet Theate, listening to the game when Todd was hurt. How different would USC's history be had he not been hurt and played the whole season? There's a contingent of fans who still say NC State injured the NC native intentionally.
Great reading!