The Clemson–South Carolina rivalry is an American collegiate athletic rivalry between the Clemson University Tigers and the University of South Carolina Gamecocks, the two largest universities in the state of South Carolina. Since 2015, the two compete in the Palmetto Series, which consists of more than a dozen athletic, head-to-head matchups. Both institutions are public universities supported by the state, and their campuses are separated by only 132 miles. South Carolina and Clemson have been bitter rivals since 1896, and a heated rivalry continues to this day for a variety of reasons, including the historic tensions regarding their respective charters and the passions surrounding their athletic programs. It has often been listed as one of the best rivalries in college sports.
Much like the Alabama–Auburn rivalry, the Clemson–South Carolina rivalry is an in-state collegiate rivalry. However, unlike Alabama–Auburn, this is one of a handful of rivalries where the teams are in different premier conferences: South Carolina is in the Southeastern Conference (SEC); Clemson is in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC).
The annual football game is considered the most important sporting event in the state. It was played first in 1896 and every year from 1909 to 2019, one of the longest uninterrupted rivalries in college football history. Until 1959, the game was played during the State Fair in Columbia, on "Big Thursday", a state holiday. Since 1960, the two schools have alternated hosting on Saturdays. In 2014, the annual football game was officially dubbed the Palmetto Bowl. As a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 meeting of the two football teams was canceled, ending an unbroken streak of 111 years of games. The game has never been contested anywhere besides Columbia or Clemson. Clemson leads the series 74–44–4, and won the most recent game with a score of 28–14.
Origin
Background
Unlike most major college rivalries, the South Carolina–Clemson rivalry did not start innocently or because of competitive collegiate sports. The deep-seated bitterness began between the two schools long before Clemson received its charter and became a college. The two institutions were founded eighty-eight years apart: South Carolina College in 1801 and Clemson Agricultural College in 1889.
South Carolina College was founded in 1801 to unite and promote harmony between the Lowcountry and the Backcountry. It closed during the Civil War when its students joined the Confederate Army, but the closure gave politicians an opportunity to reorganize it to their liking. The Radical Republicans in charge of state government during Reconstruction opened the school to blacks and women while appropriating generous funds to the university, which caused the white citizens of the state to withdraw their support for the university and view it as a symbol of the worst aspects of Reconstruction.
The Democrats returned to power in 1877 following their electoral victory over the Radical Republicans and promptly proceeded to close the university. Sentiment in the state favored opening an agriculture college, so the university was reorganized as the South Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts. In 1882, the college was renamed to its antebellum name, South Carolina College, which infuriated the farmers who felt that the politicians had frustrated the will of the people by de-emphasizing agriculture education, even though the school still retained the department of agriculture. Clemson, from its beginning, was an all-white male military school. The school remained this way until 1955 when it changed to "civilian" status for students and became a coeducational institution.
Agitation from the farmers
Benjamin Tillman emerged in the 1880s as a leader of the agrarian movement in South Carolina and demanded that the South Carolina College take agricultural education more seriously by expanding the agriculture department. In 1885, Tillman was convinced of the superiority of a separate agricultural college by Stephen D. Lee, then the president of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of the State of Mississippi, and subsequently Tillman would accept nothing less than a separate agriculture college in South Carolina. He offered the following reasons why he felt that it was necessary to have a separate agriculture college outside the confines of Columbia:
- Mississippi A&M featured practical training without unnecessary studying of the liberal arts.
- Mississippi A&M provided poor students work-scholarships so that they could attend the college.
- There were too few students who studied agriculture at the college to justify an agriculture college there.
- The college was a place "for the sons of lawyers and of the well-to-do" who sneered at the agriculture students as if they were hayseeds.
- The students at the college lived a life of luxury as compared with the sweat and toil endured by students at Mississippi A&M.
- There was not enough farm land near the college to allow for proper agriculture study.
The Conservatives, who held the reins of power in South Carolina from 1877 to 1890, replied to each point made by Tillman:
- The most advanced agriculture educational research was being conducted at the University of California and at Cornell University, both of which combined agriculture colleges with liberal arts colleges. Additionally, a separate agriculture college would be more expensive and result in an inferior product.
- The work scholarships attracted the lowest quality of students who only cared about obtaining a college degree, not about an education in agriculture or mechanical studies. Furthermore, there was little advantage of attending a college only to pitch manure and grub stumps.
- The constant attacks by Tillman on the college caused many to doubt whether state support for the institution would continue. As a result, the enrollment numbers were not impressive, although the numbers of students taking agriculture and mechanical classes increased from 34 in 1887 to 83 in 1889.
- Over half of the students at the college were the sons of farmers, though most did not study agriculture as Tillman wished. John McLaren McBryde, President of the college, correctly predicted that most students of an agriculture college would not go back to work the farm after graduation.
- While some students at the college were the sons of the well-to-do, the majority were poor.
- The college farm added 100 acres (0.4 km2) in 1887, just one mile from campus.
Clemson's will
Tillman was bolstered in 1886 when Thomas Green Clemson agreed to will his Fort Hill estate for the establishment of an agriculture college. Yet, Tillman did not want to wait until Clemson died to start a separate agriculture college so he pushed the General Assembly to use the Morrill funds and Hatch funds for that purpose. Instead, the legislature gave those funds to the South Carolina College in 1887 which would use them along with a greater state appropriation to reorganize itself as the second University of South Carolina and additionally, to expand the agriculture department greatly. After this victory for South Carolina, in January 1888 Tillman wrote a letter to the News and Courier that he was retiring from public life.
It was less than ninety days when Tillman reemerged on the scene upon the death of Thomas Green Clemson in April 1888. Tillman advocated that the state accept the gift by Clemson, but the Conservatives in power opposed the move and an all out war for power in the state commenced. The opening salvo was fired by Gideon Lee, the father of Clemson's granddaughter and John C. Calhoun's great-granddaughter Floride Isabella Lee, who wrote a letter on her behalf to the News and Courier in May that she was being denied as Calhoun's rightful heir. Furthermore, he stated that Clemson was egotistical and "only wanted to erect a monument to his own name." In November, Lee filed a lawsuit in Federal Court to contest the will which ultimately ruled against him in May 1889.
The election of 1888 afforded Tillman an opportunity to convince the politicians to accept the Clemson bequest or face the possibility of being voted out of office. He demanded that the Democratic party nominate its candidates by the primary system, which was denied, but they did accept his request that the candidates for statewide office canvass the state. Tillman proved excellent on the stump, by far superior to his Conservative opponents, and as the Democratic convention neared there was a clear groundswell of support for the acceptance of Clemson's estate.
Clemson's Bequest barely wins support
Tillman explained his justification for an independently controlled agriculture college by pointing to the mismanagement and political interference of the University of South Carolina as had occurred during Reconstruction. The agriculture college, as specified in Clemson's will, was to be privately controlled. With declining cotton prices, Tillman played upon the farmer's desperation by stating that the salaries of the college professors were exorbitant and it must be a sign of corruption. Consequently, the legislature was compelled to pass the bill to accept Clemson's bequest in December 1888, albeit with the tie-breaking vote in the state Senate from Lieutenant Governor William L. Mauldin. Thus was reborn the antagonistic feelings of regional bitterness and class division that would plague the state for decades.
Having achieved his agriculture college, Tillman was not content to sit idly by because what he really desired was power and political office. After winning the 1890 election and becoming governor, Tillman renewed the attacks on the Conservatives and those who had thwarted his agriculture college. He saved the coup de grâce for Senator Wade Hampton III, a South Carolina College graduate and Confederate General during the Civil War, who "invoked Confederate service and honor as a barrier to Tillmanism." Tillman directed the legislature to defeat Hampton's renomination for another term in December 1890.
While campaigning for governor in 1890, Tillman leveled his harshest criticism towards the University of South Carolina and threatened to close it along with The Citadel, which he called a "dude factory." Despite the rhetoric, Tillman only succeeded in reorganizing the University of South Carolina into a liberal arts college while in office. It would eventually be rechartered for the last time in 1906 as the University of South Carolina. However, Clemson Agricultural College held sway over the state legislature for decades and was generally the more popular college during the first half of the 20th century in South Carolina.
Growth Battle
In the 1950s, the University of South Carolina expanded its reach across the state by establishing branch campuses under the auspices of the University of South Carolina System. Clemson, having obtained university status in 1964, established a branch campus in Sumter and formed a two-year transfer partnership with Greenville Technical College. House Speaker Sol Blatt was alarmed by the spread of Clemson and declared that South Carolina "should build as many two-year colleges over the state as rapidly as possible to prevent the expansion of Clemson schools for the Clemson people." Accordingly, the University of South Carolina began a new wave of expansion across the state and was aided by the fact that the Clemson Sumter extension suffered from low enrollment. In 1973, Sumter officials negotiated an agreement between USC and Clemson for the school to join the USC branch system.
In the past ten years, Clemson has experienced a larger percentage of enrollment growth over its rival school. Since 2005, Clemson University has grown by 30.5 percent compared to USC's 24.5 percent growth at its main Columbia campus and a 22.5 percent enrollment increase in the entire USC system. Both schools currently enroll more students than any time in their entire history.
The annual Clemson–South Carolina football game (sometimes dubbed the "Battle of the Palmetto State", unofficially called the "Palmetto Bowl" beginning in the 1950s, and known officially since 2014 as the "Palmetto Bowl", from the state's nickname) was the longest uninterrupted series in the South and the second longest uninterrupted NCAA DI-A/FBS series in the country. The streak came to an end in 2020 as the SEC announced their member teams would not play out of conference games due to the COVID-19 pandemic, thus cancelling the matchup vs. Clemson. The series dates back to 1896, and had been renewed every year since 1909 (111 consecutive games). The universities maintain college football stadiums in excess of 77,000 seats each, placing both in the top 18 largest college football stadiums in the United States. Although the series has been interrupted seven times since its inception, it ran uninterrupted from 1909 to 2019, making it the second-longest continuous rivalry in FBS Division I college football, after only Minnesota–Wisconsin, which has played uninterrupted since 1907. From 1896 to 1959, the Clemson–South Carolina game was played in Columbia and referred to as "Big Thursday". Since 1960, the game has alternated between both teams' home stadiums—South Carolina's Williams-Brice Stadium and Clemson's Memorial Stadium, usually as the regular season finale. Since 1962, the annual football game has been held in late November, usually on Thanksgiving weekend. Games in odd-numbered years are played in Columbia at South Carolina, and even-numbered years in Clemson at Clemson University.