Herschel vs. George: Inside ‘The Great Tailback Debate’ of 1980

George Rogers didn’t want to talk about the 1980 South Carolina-Georgia game the week of the game. He didn’t want to talk about it after the game. And he doesn’t much want to talk about it now.

“Man, I don’t want to hear about that damn game no more,” Rogers told The Athletic last week.

Then he paused.

“It was a great game, though.”

It certainly was. Forty years ago, the Gamecocks and Bulldogs were the center of the college football universe. They were featured on ABC’s national game of the week, a first for South Carolina. Keith Jackson and Ara Parseghian were in Sanford Stadium for the call, and the Gamecocks were so new to the national stage that Jackson felt the need to explain their nickname to his audience.

“In case you don’t know what a Gamecock is, it’s a fightin’ rooster, that’s what it is,” he said in the sport’s most famous voice.

Georgia was No. 4 in the country. South Carolina was No. 14, its highest ranking ever.

“Oh my gosh, it was huge,” said Tommy Suggs, the former Gamecocks quarterback who by that time was working in the team’s radio booth. “It was as big as you could get. We were pretty good, and Georgia was good, and we had two super stud running backs.”

The super studs were South Carolina’s Rogers, a senior who was emerging as a serious candidate for the Heisman Trophy as the calendar turned to November, and Georgia’s Herschel Walker, the fantastic freshman who had burst on to the national scene with 877 yards in his first seven games. This visit from South Carolina, however, was the first ranked opponent Walker would face.

“Is The Nation Ready For The Great Tailback Debate?” read the page-wide headline on the column written by Jesse Outlar in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Outlar’s column, however, was relegated to the bottom of the page that Saturday morning.

Splashed across the middle of the page, from one side to the other, was the story of the day and the story of the week and the story George Rogers didn’t want to be talking about. It was the story of George Rogers Sr., who was released from prison 10 days before the game after serving seven years and 11 months for the killing of his girlfriend.

“I didn’t want that,” Rogers Jr. said recently. “I didn’t want it to be centered around me and my dad. He was eating it up, though. I was like, ‘Man please,’ and he’s just eating it up.”

Herschel Walker rushed for 200-plus yards three times as a freshman. (Getty Images)

The AJC ran two stories. One on the shy son, who it called, “South Carolina’s reluctant legend.”

“I don’t like all the attention,” Rogers Jr. said at the time. “I can’t stand it. It makes me feel self-centered. I’d like to be away and have some freedom like the others. I could think of a hundred things I’d like to do.”

The other story was on his father, who was described as a model prisoner in his three stops in Georgia’s correctional system, including the infamous Reidsville, the common name for the Georgia State Prison located near that town. Rogers Sr. acknowledged brandishing a weapon during an argument with his girlfriend but said he never intended for the gun to go off.

“Mainly I was doing it to scare her — maybe she would shut up — but it didn’t work that way,” he told the AJC. “The gun went off. I didn’t intend for it to. That’s the only thing that’s been on my mind ever since it happened.”

Chuck Allen was a senior defensive lineman on that South Carolina team. He went on to become a member of the university’s board of trustees and is the man most responsible for the Heisman Plaza that now holds a statue of Rogers outside Williams-Brice Stadium. Allen and the rest of the Gamecocks worried how the story might affect their star that week.

“I can’t remember if our coaches addressed it with us or maybe some of the team leadership talked about it, but we were aware of that and it was difficult for George,” Allen said. “Relatively speaking, for that point in college football history, it got pretty good media attention. It was sensitive for George. I felt for him of course. When you’re a kid, that kind of media attention is intimidating.”

ABC cut to Rogers Sr. in the stands just once during the game, showing the father in a bright garnet sweater and Gamecocks hat.

“There is George Rogers Sr.,” Jackson intoned. “He is seeing his son play football in person for the first time today. Released from prison just a few days ago.”

Rogers Jr. spoke only briefly with his father that day.

“He came by and shook my hand after the game and was grinning from ear to ear,” Rogers Jr. said. “He was loving it. Him being there eating it up was just killing me.”

(Rogers and his father stayed in touch until the father’s death, but the two never got much closer. “We were never that close,” Rogers said. “I didn’t patch it up. I wish I had, but it is what it is now.”)

“A lot of people were concerned that it would make George nervous and he would be a little bit distracted,” Suggs said.

Once play started, though, George was George. Herschel was Herschel. And the game lived up to the hype.

Entering the day, Rogers was second in the country with 155.6 rushing yards per game. Walker was seventh with 125.3 per game, but the Gamecocks defense was undaunted. South Carolina had surrendered an average of 8.7 points in its first seven games of the season. In Week 3, the Gamecocks held USC’s Marcus Allen, the nation’s leading rusher, to 107 yards. In Week 4, the Gamecocks beat Michigan 17-14 in Ann Arbor.

“No offense, we weren’t fearing the University of Georgia or Sanford Stadium or Vince Dooley or whatever,” Chuck Allen said. “We viewed ourselves as a top-10 program at the time. We didn’t flinch from anybody.”

South Carolina had defeated the Bulldogs in each of the previous two seasons.

“They didn’t have Herschel Walker those two times,” Rogers pointed out.

Walker had 43 carries (a school record at the time and still the sixth-most all-time by an SEC player) for 219 yards, taking the ball on 68.3 percent of Georgia’s snaps. Rogers rushed 35 times for 168 yards, carrying the offense almost single-handedly on a day in which Gamecocks completed only two passes.

“Oh my gosh,” Allen said when reminded of that statistic, “and our tight end (Willie Scott) was a first-round draft pick.”

There was no spread. There was no zone read. This was George left, George right, Herschel left, Herschel right all day long, at one point prompting this exchange between the two announcers:

Jackson: “Well, South Carolina is not being very fancy about anything, and they’re not concerned that Georgia pretty well can guess who’s going to get the ball. They’re just running right at them.”

Parseghian: “That’s been their success through the entire year, as a matter of fact through Rogers’ career. It’s not a complicated offense. It’s very simple and fundamental, and they’ve been very successful with it.”

The Bulldogs built a 13-0 lead on the strength of 57- and 51-yard field goals from Rex Robinson and a 76-yard touchdown run from Walker.

“He was a hell of a player,” Allen said. “He was a unique blend of size, speed and power, and he didn’t fumble much. He was just unique. He was so fast. He weighed about two and a quarter, which even now is pretty good size. Back then that was big. All the hype about him, none of it was exaggerated.”

The Gamecocks, though, came grinding back. South Carolina scored 10 points in the third quarter to cut the lead to 13-10 and had a first-and-10 at the Georgia 20-yard line with 6:03 left in the game.

“I had an enormous amount of confidence that we were going to win the game because that’s what we did to people,” Suggs said. “That was a (South Carolina head coach) Jim Carlen thing, left, right, left, right, here we go. We had them on the ropes, everything was moving the right direction. We had them where we wanted them. I had no doubt in my mind.”

Allen was worried, though. He played every defensive snap of the game, so most of the time the Gamecocks offense was on the field, he was “on the bench sucking air,” he said. With the game on the line late, he was up watching.

“We were just grinding, which is what we did on offense,” he said. “We were grinding it out and we got on their side of the field and when we got in field goal range, I’m like, ‘Man at least we got a tie.’ But I kept worrying about fumbling because earlier in that drive somebody had fumbled. We drove and then we ran that sweep which was such a common play for us, and I saw the ball pop up in the air.

“I’m like, you know, ‘Shit.’”

This is the other reason Rogers doesn’t love talking about the game. He turned the ball over on his 35th carry. The Bulldogs recovered at the 16-yard line and, with the help of a roughing the punter call on South Carolina, used up enough clock to put the game away.

“It was over after that,” Rogers said. “I kind of let the team down. I got my family there. I got my dad there and what do I do? I fumble.”

There’s more to that story, though. The Gamecocks called timeout before the previous play because Rogers suffered an injury to his right hand, but he remained on the sideline for only one play.

“That hand was puffed up because he took so many licks on it,” Suggs said.

Jackson: “George Rogers had gone out, his hand hurt, he comes back, can’t hold the ball as the Bulldogs knock it loose and recover the ball.”

Parseghian: “He had taken them down the field. Tough break for him. Incredible as hard hitting as this game has been Keith, there’s only been one turnover.”

Jackson: “You gotta figure, his arm is numb and he can’t squeeze and he couldn’t hold it, and it’s Georgia’s ball.”

When Georgia historian Loran Smith tried to reach Rogers after that season to interview him for a book, Carlen said his star still couldn’t talk about it.

“He’s too hurt by the outcome,” Carlen said, as Smith remembered. “He was crestfallen.”

The sequence stuck with Carlen too, Suggs said. The two men had a conversation years later in which Carlen still lamented not leaving the injured Rogers on the bench.

“He really regretted that,” Suggs said. “He should have taken him out, given him a (longer) breather or done something. I felt sorry for George, and I felt sorry for Coach Carlen as well.”

The Bulldogs won 13-10 and the next week beat Florida in their famous “Lindsay Scott, Lindsay Scott” game on the way to the 1980 national title.

“It was really one of the best low-scoring games ever at Georgia,” said Smith, who was on the sideline that day. “It really was fighting tooth and toenail. It was just a great game. It was a slugfest. If the game had been played in Columbia they might have won it, I don’t know. We left everything on the field beating South Carolina, and we then had to struggle against Florida.”

Rogers went on to win the Heisman Trophy and was selected No. 1 overall in the subsequent NFL Draft. He remains the school’s all-time rushing leader with 5,204 yards. Walker is still the SEC’s all-time leading rusher, with 5,259 yards in only three seasons.

“It was billed, it was dramatized as a battle between these two young men. It has been that way,” Jackson said during the broadcast. “They have performed nobly no matter who wins.”

The memory of the game has lived on primarily because of Rogers and Walker, but also because of the geographic proximity and intertwined natures of the two programs. Rogers was from Duluth, Ga. Bulldogs linebacker and defensive captain Frank Ros was from Greenville, S.C. Georgia’s Pat McShea, who had a critical punt block in the first half, was a South Carolina native and a high school teammate of Allen’s at T.L. Hanna in Anderson.

“Hell, I didn’t know it was him until a couple years ago when I watched the game on TV,” Allen said.

Former Georgia quarterback and future Georgia head coach Ray Goff was on the Gamecocks sideline as a running backs coach.

“We had a lot of guys from Georgia that played on the team,” Goff said. “I can remember being in Sanford Stadium, being on the other people’s sidelines. I thought it was a heck of a game.”

The Gamecocks beat Citadel and Wake Forest in the next two weeks but lost to Clemson and Pittsburgh to end the season.

“That just kind of spent us emotionally,” Allen said. “We put so much into that game that it just kind of deflated us. We just never were the same team. The way we lost especially. We knew we could win the game going in, and we felt like we were about to win it and then we had that mistake and it took a lot out of us.

“That was a hell of a ball game, man.”

— The Athletic’s Seth Emerson contributed to this story.

(Photo of George Rogers: Courtesy of South Carolina Athletics)