The real story of why South Carolina left the Atlantic Coast Conference

Excerpted, with permission, from “A Gamecock Odyssey: University of South Carolina Sports in the Independent Era,” by Alan Piercy. Copyright University of South Carolina. The book is available for purchase directly from University of South Carolina Press, independent retail outlets like All Good Books, and Amazon.

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It has been over 52 years since the University of South Carolina relinquished its membership in the ACC, a conference it helped found in 1953. When the Gamecocks bolted the ACC on June 30, 1971, they charted a path along a winding, wilderness road, with no clear route back to an all-sports conference home.

Over time, urban legends around Carolina’s ACC departure took hold in the popular imagination. Some thought it was driven by Frank McGuire, exhausted by years of ACC wars as coach at both North and South Carolina. “Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate,” as then USC president Thomas Jones once quipped.

Others pointed to athletics director and head football coach Paul Dietzel, concerned by the ACC’s admission standards which were more stringent than the broader NCAA. This cost Dietzel a bevy of high-profile recruits just as his program began to hit its stride following its 1969 ACC championship.

Still others point to a general dissatisfaction with the ACC among the USC board of trustees, and more generally, Carolina alumni and fans, over the power structure of the ACC’s governing body, concentrated as it was along Tobacco Road, among the “Big Four” North Carolina members. This dissatisfaction grew incrementally more bitter between 1965, when the Gamecocks were stripped of a share of its first ACC football title, and 1971, when USC ultimately departed.

Undoubtedly, all of those factors played a part. Of those, however, Paul Dietzel, in his dual role of athletics director and head football coach was the driving force.

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s as collegiate athletics evolved into big business with ever expanding budgets, a boom in facilities expansion and construction, and the addition of women’s varsity sports, the job of a Division I athletics director grew in complexity to the point that it became unmanageable for a full-time coach. It was an outdated administrative structure which most universities had abandoned in lieu of a strong athletics director to oversee and unite the entire department. South Carolina’s failure to evolve administratively led to deep divisions and instability within the university’s athletics sphere.

Though Frank McGuire certainly had misgivings about the ACC’s power structure and had developed a number of powerful enemies within the conference, he also understood the value of the ACC for his basketball program.

McGuire had molded the Gamecocks into elite status by 1971, achieving national prominence, an undefeated regular-season ACC championship in 1970, and a first-ever ACC tournament championship in 1971. His teams regularly filled the plush new Carolina Coliseum’s 12,401 seats primarily on the strength of its heated rivalries with the likes of Duke, UNC, Maryland and NC State.

Further, McGuire was steeped in the ACC from the moment of the conference’s birth, having taken the UNC job in 1952, just one year before the ACC’s founding.

Dietzel, on the other hand, spent seven seasons at SEC power Louisiana State, before moving onto Army in 1962, and ultimately South Carolina in 1966. He famously won a national championship at LSU in 1958, and his time in the SEC provided the lens through which he judged the competitiveness of ACC football.

Upon taking the South Carolina job, Dietzel was alarmed by the ACC’s dismal record of futility against non-conference opponents in football. Indeed, the ACC ranked last among all conferences in terms of non-conference victories. Against the SEC in particular, the ACC had compiled an embarrassing record of 19 wins versus 105 defeats between 1953 and 1966. This was of particular concern to Dietzel given that South Carolina’s recruiting footprint overlapped with SEC schools to a greater extent than other ACC programs with the exception of Clemson.

Adding to the urgency was the recent integration of high schools and colleges in South Carolina and across the South. Citing 1965 data, Clemson’s president Robert Edwards noted that 93.4 percent of Black high school seniors in the state of South Carolina who took the SAT that year scored below 800, then the ACC’s minimum for competition. Dietzel complained to USC’s president Jones, “it’s going to be very difficult to explain to people around here, that of all the fine black athletes playing in our newly integrated high schools, we cannot find one of them who can attend his state university.”

Dietzel led a faction of ACC administrators wishing to scrap the 800-rule in favor of the NCAA’s less restrictive 1.6 GPA predictive model. Illustrating that politics make strange bedfellows, Dietzel received highly vocal support from Clemson’s Frank Howard, as well as officials at NC State and Maryland, while UNC, Duke, Wake Forest and Virginia wanted to uphold the ACC’s standard.

With the ACC frozen in gridlock on the topic, USC officials at Dietzel’s prompting took matters into their own hands in the fall of 1970, greenlighting Gamecock coaches to recruit on the basis of the NCAA’s 1.6 GPA standard. It was a brazen act of institutional defiance. On March 29, 1971, USC’s board of trustees announced that the university would withdraw from the ACC effective August 15 of that year (later advanced to June 30).

The 800-rule controversy was resolved a short time later when two student-athletes at Clemson University filed suit in federal court against Clemson and the ACC. Their attorneys argued that the 800-rule deprived them of their constitutional rights to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment since the rule applied on only athletes. On August 7, 1972, US District Court Judge Robert Hemphill agreed that the ACC’s standard was “arbitrary and capricious” and “not based on valid reasoning.” Eleven days later, just over thirteen months after South Carolina’s ACC exit, the ACC dropped the embattled 800-rule.

South Carolina’s return to the ACC was by then out of the question. The earth was salted, the ground scorched, and institutional relationships lay beyond repair for some time to come. Unbeknownst and unimaginable to fans at the time, USC had begun what would prove to be a twenty-year journey through the wilderness of independent status.