The talk was rampant on Monday -- the new polls had Nebraska leaping to No. 1 and South Carolina checked in at No. 2. With only two games left, the Orange Bowl was looking to have a Cornhuskers-Gamecocks matchup for the national by-God championship.

USC, fresh off a beat-down of Florida State, was 9-0 and feeling good. The roadblocks of the schedule were behind and the Gamecocks had hurdled all of them. All that remained were two road games, including a tough one at Clemson.

That rivalry game was going to be brutal, no doubt about it. The Tigers, even on NCAA probation, were always looking for blood when they played the Gamecocks. In a year where USC was the darling of the country, buddy, forget about it.

But USC knew it could win. Knew it.

And that's where it started to go wrong.

"I don't remember taking them for granted or looking past them," quarterback Mike Hold began, "but probably, we did."

The Gamecocks didn't play Clemson after Florida State. They played Navy.

Twenty-five years later, that is the worst four-letter word any Gamecock can say.

"We probably, and I don't mean to blame it on everybody, when we went to play Navy, the media came out and talked about the Clemson game," offensive coordinator Frank Sadler said. "That was going to determine who went to the national championship game. All anybody could talk about was the Clemson game. It took all the focus off of Navy."

"I still think about it," receiver Eric Poole lamented. "We had oranges getting thrown at us on the field (against East Carolina), then we go up and survive NC State, then we had more oranges against Florida State. I think it got into our heads a little bit."

Although Morrison warned the media without tongue in cheek that Navy could be the most dangerous team on the schedule, the hype wormed its way under his trademark black ballcap. These was the Gamecocks, playing an exciting brand of offensive football with a devastating defense, going up against the Midshipmen, 3-5-1 and without All-American tailback Napoleon McCallum. McCallum had broken his leg earlier in the season and Navy was missing five other starters due to injuries.

Throughout the 1984 season, as the Gamecocks won and won, Morrison constantly preached the dangers of listening to outsiders. He stressed to his team to not read the paper, watch the news or listen to the radio.

And then he violated his standing order.

"It was right before we left," offensive tackle Bill Barnhill said. "He was late coming out to practice. He said, 'I just got off the phone with the Orange Bowl. We beat Navy, we're going to play in the Orange Bowl.'"

With that ringing in their ears, the Gamecocks had a good week of practice, Barnhill said. They were ready to head up to Annapolis, Md., and keep their perfect season going.

Again, there was a change of plans.

"Then coach Morrison decided to go up there to Navy, decided to make it educational and change the itinerary," Sadler said. "When we got to practice, the kids looked at it like it was kind of a vacation for them. We just didn't stay focused like we ought to."

For the first time all season, USC switched its road routine. Quarterback Allen Mitchell remembered that it was a standard procedure -- leave Columbia, fly to the destination, bus from the airport to the stadium, work out, go to the hotel, eat, watch a movie, go to bed. That's what it had been at Notre Dame and NC State, that's what it had been at Navy the previous year.

This time, it changed.

"We went up early that morning, went to the Smithsonian, toured Washington," Mitchell said. "Then we went to the stadium. Then we went to the hotel -- just had a quick run-through at the stadium."

The mighty Gamecocks stared at the tiny field and the bare stands, thinking that most of them had played at a stadium like this in high school. They were heavily favored and although the wind was blowing stray snowflakes around them, they weren't worried.

"That was the only time the coaches let us veer off that path," Mitchell said. "But it doesn't fall back on the coaches, it falls back on us."

The Gamecocks showed up on a horribly cold day, although the sun was shining. USC's warm-weather boys obviously weren't used to it ("We had the long sleeves and the gloves and all that kind of stuff, and we were still freezing," Hold said) but figured it was a minute distraction.

It was going to be a rout. Everyone knew it. The Gamecocks kicked off and prepared to start it.

Joe Brooks intercepted a pass on Navy's first possession at the Midshipmen 34-yard-line. The veer offense struggled to get afoot, so Scott Hagler was summoned for a field goal.

Blocked.

No matter -- Hinton Tayloe pounced on a fumble on the Middies' second possession, giving the Gamecocks a first down at the Navy 48.

Mitchell couldn't find the handle on a pitchout, lost 14 yards and the Gamecocks punted.

Before USC knew it, Navy had marched downfield for a touchdown. Sensing the urgency of the situation -- a massive wave of student midshipmen had rushed to the end zone for seven quick push-ups after the score -- Mitchell regrouped for an 80-yard drive and a 2-yard touchdown to tie it.

But then the Midshipmen scored again, taking a 14-7 lead into halftime. It could have been more but Carl Hill picked off a pass to squelch a late Navy threat.

It was no problem. USC had trailed at the half three times that season and had won them all. Morrison voiced his same philosophy -- stick to the plan, the offense will eventually click, the defense will keep us in it. It's not, repeat, not, a problem.

On the second play of the fourth quarter, it was a big, big problem.

Todd Solomon danced into the end zone, the brigade of middies again rushed to the field for their push-ups and the scoreboard read Navy 38, USC 7. The Gamecocks got two late touchdowns to make the score somewhat respectable but they were too far gone.

And their dreams of a perfect season with that long-sought national championship were gone as well.

"You ever wake up in the morning feeling pretty good?" Barnhill asked. "Then you come home at the end of the day and you feel like a truck hit you? We just had one of those days. The offense wasn't clicking; the defense wasn't doing anything."

Morrison's veer, predicated on different looks at the skill positions, conked out. The running game got 102 yards. Hold, the quarterback who'd built his reputation on inspiring late-game heroics, threw three interceptions. The rotating QB system allowed the weather to work its wintry effects.

"As cold as it was, it made it a lot harder to go in," Mitchell said. "When I went back in, that ball felt like a rock. You've been out there playing, getting all sweaty and lathered up, then come to the sideline with no jacket, you got bone cold. Then you get sent back out there to play.

"That was something we hadn't experienced before. That military mentality they had, once they got up on us, they wouldn't let down. Every football season, you watch. Every season, there's one team that rolls through almost undefeated. There's always that one game. And that's the memory for me -- that one game that got us."

"I still ask myself what happened," Bryant "Mookie" Gilliard said. "I know that day was a very strange day. There were very few things that seemed to go our way. It was just a different day. I've always said, if we could play that game over, it'd be a completely different situation."

But they couldn't.

The fallout continued as the game ended. Top-ranked Nebraska also lost that day. A potential No. 1 ranking sailed away with Navy.

The bowl situation wasn't the same as it is now. In 1984, bowls plotted which teams they wanted and began filling up before the end of the regular season. The Orange Bowl was such a realistic goal that although nothing was ever chiseled in stone, USC was set to go.

If the Gamecocks beat Navy.

"Basically, that Thursday night, (Morrison) had accepted the Orange Bowl bid on the contention that we beat Navy," Mitchell said. "Had we not committed, we could have picked where we wanted to go."

"The Sugar Bowl, all those bowls started taking other teams," Hold said. "The Sugar Bowl wanted us and we said, 'No, we're going to the Orange Bowl.' And they backed away."

The Gamecocks couldn't even take solace in the fact that just across the state, Clemson had lost to Maryland. The Tigers had their national championship; USC had just let its best chance at one slip away.

A boisterous crowd cheered the Gamecocks anyway as they arrived in Columbia, but the team, although it appreciated it, didn't feel like being congratulated. They went to campus, slept and reported to the stadium the next day.

"I guess it was Sunday when we went in to watch film. You could have heard a pin drop in that room," Barnhill said. "(Morrison) came walking into the room, had the chart up on the board."

The chart read:

1. National championship.

2. Orange Bowl.

3. $2 million.

"Then he wrote a word I can't say," Barnhill said. "But like 'outhouse.' Said, 'Guys, we just missed out on a chance to be No. 1, we're not going to be national champions, we're not going to the Orange Bowl, we're not going to get $2 million. We're in the outhouse.'

"Then he walked out."

"He was upset," Poole said. "He felt like we had the Orange Bowl basically right there in our grasp. He's like, 'I don't know what we're going to do now. We've still got one more game to play.'

"I remember him saying something along the lines of, 'I don't know where we're going to go now.' We knew we were going to go to a bowl game. But we screwed it up and we'll do the best we can and we'll find some place to go."

The players, even a quarter of a century later, still don't know exactly what happened that day. Strange, perhaps, that the game that more than any other defines USC's football history doesn't have an ironclad cause behind it, but that's the way it is.

"It's really hard to put a finger on what happened," Hold said. "They got hot and we didn't."

Hagler, one of the quietest responders when talking about it, perfectly summed it.

"It was a wake-up call and we never woke up."

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