Pain of 2024 Celebration Bowl loss drives South Carolina State’s bid for redemption

South Carolina State wide receiver Jordan Smith still remembers the excitement of 2021, when the Bulldogs won their first Black college national championship trophy. But he also recalls the sting of last season’s Celebration Bowl loss to Jackson State, a cloud that followed him through all 12 games this season. 

Now the fifth-year wide receiver is preparing for his third Celebration Bowl appearance. On Saturday, Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference champion South Carolina State (9-3, 5-0 MEAC) will face Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) champion Prairie View A&M (10-3, 7-1 SWAC) in the 2025 Celebration Bowl in Atlanta, and Smith said the Bulldogs have redemption on their minds.

“Confetti dropping for the other team, and not y’all. It just fuels us not to be on that side again. … I think everybody of course wants revenge, but they’re also not counting out the other team,” Smith said. “I think everybody’s just kind of ready and just focused on what we have to do to be successful. … It was a bitter taste in our mouth last year.”

When his players returned for spring football and summer workouts, head coach Chennis Berry and his team spent the offseason confronting the sting head-on, replaying every mistake as fuel rather than failure. 

The team motto entering this season was “Be back better, brick by brick,” a reminder of how last year’s Celebration Bowl performance fell far short of who the Bulldogs believed they were as a team. Berry said players left the field stunned and hurt, knowing they hadn’t executed in any phase of the game – offense, defense or special teams.

He spent the offseason refocusing his team’s intent to win the football program’s second Celebration Bowl title in five years.

“You do me once, shame on you. But if you do me twice, shame on me. I had to learn from that and took some growing lessons,” Berry said. “So we already changed things. We’re so process-oriented, and everything starts with the process. The whole crux of the matter is we have to do a good job of buying in. I mean, if there’s no buy in, there’s nothing.”

According to Berry, he and his coaching staff have about 40 newcomers — a mix of transfers and freshmen — in the program this season. With a roster full of new faces, he emphasized that nothing works unless coaches, leaders and players fully commit to the program’s vision. He added that talent alone isn’t enough; the Bulldogs prioritize finding players and staff who fit their culture, built around the principles of their “DIG DEEP” philosophy: discipline, integrity, God, dedication, effort, execution and pride.

South Carolina State entered this season without former MEAC Player of the Year Eric Phoenix and Aaron Smith, the emotional leader of the defense who broke a Celebration Bowl record for most tackles in a game (17). Despite sweeping teams in conference play this season, the Bulldogs had only five players earn All-MEAC first team honors, third most behind North Carolina Central and Delaware State.

Former South Carolina State head coach Buddy Pough is the program’s athletic director. Pough believes Berry returning fewer than 50% of his roster from 2024, yet still having the same success as last season, is proof that the coach and his staff are building a well-rounded team.

“He’s done maybe the best job of developing a team of any time I’ve seen around here,” said Pough, who was the Bulldogs’ head coach from 2002 to 2023 and an assistant coach from 1979 to 1985. “That team just kept getting a little bit better every week, each step of the way [and] each MEAC game. I just thought it was a magnificent coaching job.”

Smith, who finished the season with a team-high 791 receiving yards and seven touchdowns, explained that stepping into a leadership role pushed him to elevate every aspect of his game by locking in on the small, everyday habits that help him grow. 

He said the winning culture at South Carolina State was already firmly in place, so when newcomers arrived, it became the responsibility of returning players to show them how things are done. The Bulldogs committed themselves to doing whatever it took to win games, he said.

“It’s a ‘we can’t be denied’ type of culture. … We’re always the underdog, and we love that. I just feel like it fuels us,” Smith said. “[Coaches] tell us all the time, like, they’re going to make sure we’re in the right position to be successful. They stay on us, and they just continue to make sure that we’re not slacking off. They always remind us to stay humble but hungry.”

For Pough, the moment everything shifted was in September, when South Carolina State suffered a stunning, late-game loss against Charleston Southern.

“It was obvious how hurt we were having lost that game, and from that point going forward, you can see the difference in our guys’ focus and attitudes,” Pough said.

The Bulldogs won four out of five one-possession games this season, showing their perseverance in tight battles. Under Berry, South Carolina State hasn’t lost a conference game in two seasons, finishing 10-0 in the MEAC, and is currently on a seven-game win streak.

Berry is 1-2 against the SWAC in his two seasons as a Division I head coach, earning a win over Bethune-Cookman this season but losing to Florida A&M and Jackson State last year. South Carolina State leads the MEAC all time in conference football championships with 20 between Berry and former head coaches Willie Jeffries, Bill Davis and Pough.

Among current members in the MEAC, South Carolina State boasts the Celebration Bowl championship they won in 2021 after defeating Jackson State, and North Carolina Central also earned a title after defeating Jackson State in 2022. If the Bulldogs win on Saturday, they will have the most Celebration Bowl titles among current SWAC and MEAC teams. 

“I know we’ve got championships galore over the years in the conference, and we just kind of take that in stride as being part of our regular year,” Pough said. “We expect to be in the [Celebration Bowl]. We put the championship date up on our press box each year.”

After securing the MEAC bid on Nov. 22 by defeating Delaware State for the conference title, the Bulldogs have approached their two weeks of Celebration Bowl preparation differently this season.

“We’re still practicing like we’re playing a game as opposed to last year. [Then] was more trying to get healthy, [we] did walkthroughs and went a little slower with our tempo,” Berry said. “But the last couple practices we’ve had, they’ve been physical practices, a lot of situational things that we didn’t do last year.”

Berry said the Bulldogs are focused on what they must do to be the best version of themselves on the field in Atlanta, something they failed at a season ago.

“It’s really about us versus us. … Good things are going to happen [and] bad things are going to happen,” Berry said. “We just keep playing. Our guys have learned from that, grown from that, and I think we’re better built this year than we were for those moments in 2024.”

The post Pain of 2024 Celebration Bowl loss drives South Carolina State’s bid for redemption appeared first on Andscape.