A Time to Celebrate South Carolina State Coach Buddy Pough
December 2021 is already proven to be a celebratory month in the illustrious coaching career of Buddy Pough.
The culmination of his eighth MEAC championship season at South Carolina State lands the Bulldogs in their first-ever Celebration Bowl.
They’ll play in a sold-out Mercedes-Benz Stadium, sharing the stage with — and potentially stealing the spotlight from — Jackson State and much ballyhooed coach Deion Sanders.
The sixth edition of the postseason classic pitting the champions of the MEAC and SWAC head-to-head marks a significant milestone in the recent resurgence of HBCU football, and Pough — as one of the banner-carriers for the brand in the last two decades — being involved is only fitting.
This month also made evident Buddy Pough’s influence on the whole of college football.
Power Five conference programs introduced a pair of former South Carolina State assistants, Billy Napier and Tony Elliott, as their new head coaches this month.
In his introductory press conference at Virginia on Monday, Elliott thanked South Carolina State and Furman for setting the foundation for his career trajectory.
“I’m eternally grateful to you guys, helping me develop as a young coach,” he said.
Elliott spent two seasons at South Carolina State, his first coaching gig after leaving an engineering job with Michelin. He coached the Bulldogs wide receivers in 2006 and 2007 before taking the same job at Furman in 2008 through 2010, then landing at Clemson as a running backs coach in the program’s transformative years.
Clemson won the ACC in 2011, Elliott’s first season on Dabo Swinney’s staff. The Tigers’ conference title has been overshadowed in the decade since, the result of a historically lopsided Orange Bowl loss to West Virginia.
But in 2012, Clemson ended the campaign with a Peach Bowl defeat of LSU that foreshadowed the program’s breakthrough success. The 2013 Tigers won the ACC and scored Orange Bowl redemption with a win over Ohio State, capping a season in which Roderick McDowell rushed for more than 1,000 yards.
“We'd taken some coaches in the past from Clemson upon their recommendations. We brought Tony in as more of a developmental guy, coaching-wise, more than anything,” Pough told the Greenville News in December 2014. “He was just a top-notch guy, a real mature guy, an attention-to-detail guy. From the first day, it was obvious he wouldn't be here very long.”
As brief as Elliott’s tenure with South Carolina State turned out, it lasted longer than Napier’s. Napier spent just one season with the Bulldogs, 2005, coaching quarterbacks.
It was an important season, however, with South Carolina State going 9-2 and winning its first MEAC championship under Pough.
Napier was part of the pipeline of Clemson graduates to which Pough alluded in 2014, landing at South Carolina State after his time as a Tigers graduate assistant ended in 2004.
“Man, you’re dating me here a little bit here. 2005, that’s a long time ago,” Napier joked when I asked him about moving to South Carolina State1. “Really had no ambition of coaching college football. My dad was a high school football coach; I was trying to get my Masters degree so I could make $6,000 more a year. And that was advice my dad have given me.
“Buddy called me in June and offered me a job there coaching the quarterbacks and an opportunity to call the plays. I had so much respect for Buddy — not only his experience at South Carolina with Brad Scott and Lou Holtz, but also, he was a legendary high school coach who ran a great program.”
In a fun bit of candor, the new head Florida Gator Napier revealed perhaps the most relatable motivation a big-time college football coach has ever had for pursuing the profession.
“At that point, I was 25, I was single and felt like ‘You know what? I’m gonna give this a shot.’ The underlining story there is I was pursuing my wife at the time and she was about 45 minutes down the road in Charleston.
“That made that decision a lot easier,” Napier said.
The common reality of being young and in love playing an integral part in shaping college football history might be an even bigger surprise than two of the hottest, new head coaches in the game coming from the same small, HBCU.
The sudden rise in visibility of HBCU football is in part a byproduct of newcomers like Sanders, Tennessee State’s Eddie George and Grambling’s recent hire of Hue Jackson adding star power to the sidelines.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but someone like Pough deserves more applause for climbing the ranks into the HBCU then rebuilding the foundation.
He went from winning a state championship at South Carolina’s Fairfield Central to land an assistant’s job at South Carolina. Pough coached on the 2000 and 2001 Outback Bowl-winning teams, two landmark moments in establishing the Gamecocks’ footing in the SEC.
That tenure earned him the head coaching position at his alma mater, South Carolina State, where he’s won a pair of Black National Championships in the years immediately after Elliott’s and Napier’s tenures.
A win in the Celebration Bowl would likely land Pough a third title — and against the rising star Sanders, put a fitting bow on a month that’s solidified Pough’s importance to college football.
For what it’s worth, I was in college on the football beat for The Daily Wildcat when Napier was breaking into coaching at South Carolina State, so if my question made him feel old…that makes two of us.