In 1974 USC made an 'abortive' attempt to hire Lou Holtz

Twenty-five years before his triumphant return to Columbia, the Gamecocks tried to hire a former USC assistant and rising star, Lou Holtz, away from N.C. State.

In 1974 Michael Mungo was just five years in to his 47-year tenure on the University of South Carolina board of trustees, but he was already developing a hard-won reputation as one of the board’s most unruly members. When the board went into executive session on Dec. 11, the second order of business was a motion raised by Mungo asking the board to reconsider his removal from the athletics committee. The board had taken up this action two weeks earlier, as reprisal for Mungo circumventing the search committee appointed to hire a new football coach, entering into his own talks with N.C. State coach Lou Holtz, and publicly criticizing the search committee for being slow to act.

In the pages of the Columbia Record, Mungo decried the university’s search as “inefficient,” complaining that he’d been unjustly persecuted for the “heresy” of criticizing “sacred athletics procedure.” Mungo resented the outsourcing of the hiring process to the 12-person, university president-appointed search committee, believing that role more properly belonged to the board’s athletics committee, of which Mungo had (until recently) been a member.

Mungo said he could see the search committee dragging things out for another month (here, Mungo was clearly wrong; the university began contract negotiations with its eventual hire the next day ) and that Holtz would have accepted the job if the search committee hadn’t wasted so much time.

As to the latter, only Lou Holtz knows whether Mungo was right. But there was enough credibility behind the notion to make this the lead story on the Nov. 18 edition of the Charlotte Observer’s sports page.

Holtz is “going to Columbia, and there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do to keep him,” a source told the Observer. “I hear [South Carolina has] made him on offer he simply cannot turn down … Or, if he does, he should be committed.”

The source’s impression of the offer made to Holtz jibes with the experience Jim Carlen — who USC eventually hired — had during his own interview process. “Whatever it took to get me there, they were willing to pay,” Carlen said in a 1984 deposition for his wrongful termination suit against USC. “‘If you can get us a respectable football team, you can be governor.’”

Holtz himself was evasive in his initial public comments, saying only “I haven’t signed anything” and “I can’t make any comment on that right now.” When contacted by the Record for comment on the story in the Observer, Holtz denied the speculation more forcefully: “I have not received an offer from South Carolina and I haven’t sought one.”

When Holtz eventually passed on the job, he called South Carolina “the wrong place at the wrong time” and board of trustees minutes characterized negotiations as Holtz as “abortive.”

Back in the Dec. 11 executive sessions — with finalists Mooney Player and Jim Carlen waiting outside to be interviewed — Mungo complained that he did not like his new committee assignment and that in removing him from the athletics committee the board had violated his Constitutionally-protected first-amendment rights. Another board member replied that Mungo “misapprehended his right to free speech” which did not extend to “making offers to Lou Holtz.”¹

Departing now from the historical record and entering into informed speculation, I don’t think it’s hard to see why Holtz may have in fact been quite interested in the position initially but ultimately walked away early in negotiations. First, it’s a matter of public record that Holtz would have been dealing with a fractious board of trustees that struggled to speak with one voice. Second, South Carolina still had a quite unusual athletic directorship, with power shared between the football and basketball coach in a way that tended to foment division and mistrust between the two programs. In a letter to the board of trustees, basketball assistant Don Walsh warned that the athletic director position was “powerless” and that “I doubt very much there is another Athletic Directorship like this in the United States.”

There were members of the board who wanted to consolidate the athletics director role into a single position and make it so that the positions of football coach and athletics director had to be held by two different people. (In fact, a motion on this issue was taken up and defeated during that same executive session.) But that was still six years from becoming reality, when the board fired Carlen as football coach and athletics director.

Taking the foregoing into account, leaving a stable job at N.C. State — which had just beaten South Carolina and finished ranked in the top 10 — would have been quite a career risk to Holtz, even he had been an assistant at USC in ‘68 under the man (Paul Dietzel) who it appeared might be staying on as athletic director (he didn’t; the athletic director position became a line in the sand for Carlen during his negotiations with the school.)

1. According to contemporaneous notes taken by board secretary Dr. George Curry.