Looking back at the 2007 football game between South Carolina and North Carolina

COLUMBIA – Prior to 2007, the longest South Carolina and North Carolina had gone without playing each other was seven years.

And it took a Great Depression and two World Wars to cause that long of a hiatus between the regional rivals that are separated by just 200 miles.

Since the first game back in 1903, USC and UNC have squared off 58 times but just 10 times in the last 40 years. In that span, the renewal of the old rivalry in 2007 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, opened up a flurry where the two teams played four times from 2007 to as recently as 2019.

South Carolina and North Carolina are slated to face off in the 2021 Duke’s Mayo Bowl at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte Dec. 30 (11:30 a.m. ET, ESPN) and it’ll mark the 11th meeting since 1981 for an old rivalry between both Carolinas’ flagship university football programs.

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Ahead of the latest installment between South Carolina-North Carolina this bowl season, let’s look back to 2007 and tell the story behind the thriller then-No. 7 South Carolina won over UNC, 21-15.

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Eric Hyman always stayed true to his scheduling philosophy as an athletic director. South Carolina was the fourth athletic director post for the North Carolina alumnus, having formerly served at TCU, Miami (Ohio) and VMI.

When it came to working out future game contracts and agreements, the top priorities were geography -- so fans could travel -- and national exposure.

Talks of a home-and-home series between the schools already had taken place, but soon after he took over the athletic department in Columbia, Hyman and then-North Carolina AD Dick Baddour nailed out a two-game series that had the Gamecocks playing on the road in 2007; the Tar Heels would return the trip the following season.

Before the first game could be played, UNC was approached to participate in a kickoff classic game in 2008. Baddour asked if the Columbia date of the home-and-home could be moved back, and Hyman obliged. That decision wasn’t met with much fervor from South Carolina fans.

“I remember I got criticized for it,” Hyman said. “We had to postpone the return game and put it off about six or seven years to fit into the schedule.

“Gamecock fans were upset with me for doing it. They thought I was giving preferential treatment to North Carolina. But I kept saying they would do the same for us. The reality is you treat people how you want to be treated.”

The return game was played in 2013, and South Carolina won both meetings.

Inside lead-up to 2007 South Carolina-North Carolina matchup

Redshirt freshman quarterback Chris Smelley was thrust into the starting quarterback role following senior quarterback Blake Mitchell’s suspension for the season-opening game against Louisiana-Lafayette for missing some summer school classes.

Early in the game with the Ragin’ Cajuns, Smelley separated his right shoulder – pretty severely, in fact – but gutted out the rest of the game. From then on, he was never the same.

“Just barely surviving,” Smelley told The Greenville News. “Honestly, the injury changed me. I was never the same. I could not throw the ball the same after that injury.”

Smelley battled shoulder weakness for the rest of the 2007 season – really, the rest of his career – and underwent surgery after the season. Each game week, he managed how much he would throw during practices and spent countless hours in the training room.

“I took a lot of extra time trying to maintain to get to the next week. And on Saturday on gamedays, the competitor in you comes out and you know other guys are banged up that you block it out and give it your best shot and give everything you got,” Smelley said.

Mitchell returned for the second game and led the Gamecocks to back-to-back wins, including at No. 11 Georgia. But a rough start at LSU saw USC coach Steve Spurrier make a change and bring Smelley in the second half to finish the game.

Smelley started the next three games on a bum shoulder and but guided South Carolina to wins over Mississippi State and No. 8 Kentucky before the showdown with North Carolina on Oct. 13.

During the week leading up to the game, Hyman appeared on a radio show out of Charlotte and made a comment that fired up Tar Heels football fans.

“We both had very good teams. We weren’t chopped liver. But I always felt like football at North Carolina was the hors d'oeuvres before the main course, which was basketball. UNC fans didn’t like what I had to say,” Hyman said. “It was a joke, but I remember the game a lot.”

Inside South Carolina’s second-half struggles against North Carolina

The Gamecocks got off the blazing start. Smelley, despite the separated shoulder, came out firing and carved UNC’s defense up for a career-high three touchdown passes in the first half. Smelley remembers the touchdown pass he threw to tight end Jared Cook right before halftime and wide receiver Kenny McKinley bailing him out on a few throws that day.

South Carolina was the No. 7-ranked team in the country, sitting at 5-1 with wins against Georgia and Kentucky on its resume. The Heels limped into the matchup with USC at 2-4 with losses to East Carolina and Virginia.

Smelley and his team took a 21-3 lead into the locker room at Chapel Hill, but as he puts in, that’s when things changed for not only the rest of the game that day but the remainder of the 2007 season.

“I’ve had a lot of people ask me about the second half of that game, and to this point, I haven’t seen it written about before, but something happened at halftime of that North Carolina game,” Smelley said.

The USC freshman quarterback said he “vividly” remembers a “toxic energy” inside the team’s locker room that day. Things got emotional.

“It may have been this sort of, ‘Are we really good enough to be seventh in the nation?’ There were some doubts in the backs of peoples’ minds. I vividly remember the negativity and players crying in that locker room,” Smelley said. “There was a lot of negative emotion let out at that halftime. Why it happened then? I don’t know. I really thought it shook everybody up in a negative way.

“We left the locker room, went out and barely survived the game,” Smelley said. “I don’t know if it was a change in confidence from players to coaches and coaches to players. It was a strange halftime that had a lot of negative emotion built into it. We took a downhill turn the rest of that season.”

Smelley said the felt the toxic energy may have been building within the team before that day and that not one was single person was to blame for the boil-over in the underbelly of Kenan Memorial Stadium.

After the locker room drama, South Carolina returned to the field and laid a dud. The offense managed 62 yards in the second half.

UNC quarterback T.J. Yates led two touchdown drives in the fourth quarter to cut the deficit to 21-15 with 3:03 left.

Standout place kicker Ryan Succop, who was 7-for-9 on field goals entering the day, doinked a 48-yard field attempt, missing with 46 seconds to go.

North Carolina drove to the Gamecocks' 31 before Cook and McKinley were called in to play prevent defense. They knocked down the final two passes to the end zone from Yates to clinch the win.

“We found a way to survive. Nothing was going our way,” Smelley said. “We had to grit one out in the end.

“But I thought it was cool that to play in that game because South Carolina and North Carolina hadn’t played in a long time.”

Hope for more South Carolina-North Carolina football games

That was the sense of pride Hyman felt -- an old rivalry had made a return to the gridiron.

“To have to re-energized and play was a huge plus,” Hyman said.

Hyman left to become AD at Texas A&M in 2012 before moving on to consulting work; now he’s retired. Smelley has coached high school football back home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and looks to get back into it after taking this year off.

There are two more USC-UNC matchups scheduled -- the upcoming Duke’s Mayo Bowl and the 2023 season opener in Charlotte.

Smelley and Hyman agree that the schools should look into bringing the game back on a regular basis, that it has staying power.

“Looking back on it now, 15 years removed, it seems like this should be something that’s made into a big game,” Smelley said. “It seems to fit and can be made into a yearly rivalry game that I think both fan bases enjoy seeing and really get behind.”

Cory Diaz covers the South Carolina Gamecocks for The Greenville News as part of the USA TODAY Network. Follow his work for all things Gamecocks on Twitter: @CoryDiaz_TGN

This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Looking back at 2007 South Carolina-North Carolina football game