This is the first of a three-part series on former Gamecocks coaching in the NFL.
Travelle Wharton has spent his entire career learning from college football legends.
He played offensive line at the University of South Carolina under Hall of Fame coach Lou Holtz. As an NFL offensive lineman, Wharton was on a Carolina Panthers team led by John Fox and Ron Rivera.
And when he began his coaching career, he started at South Carolina under another Hall of Famer in Steve Spurrier. And now, as the assistant offensive line coach for the Baltimore Ravens, he sees a little bit of all of them in his coaching style.
“I catch myself with just a gumbo of stuff that coaches said. I laugh and I'm like, ‘Man, I really said that? Don't be a walker, jog off and blah blah blah,”’ Wharton says. “It's funny that I do find myself saying a lot of things that coaches said that we used to laugh at. Now it's become part of me.”
Wharton was an All-SEC left tackle and team captain for the Gamecocks, starting 47 games from 2000 to 2003 while also earning a degree in retail management.
But it wasn’t until his rookie year with the Panthers — when he helped as an assistant coach at a local high school — where coaching crept into his mind.
“I just fell in love with that right there. When you get a young player that's eager to learn to get better, and then when you see them do it, it's like, ‘Oh man, you got it. Now we got to keep on perfecting it,’” Wharton says. “I love it because you find different ways of teaching it and it helps you grow.”
So once his decade-long NFL career was over, he headed back to his home state of South Carolina to begin his coaching career.
Wharton served as a quality control coach for the Gamecocks in 2015 where he got a crash course in the daily tasks of building a program.
“Getting that opportunity just to come down here and learn from (Holtz and Spurrier) who've had so much success and see how they did things in the building — whether it's game plan or treating people — I've been very fortunate to be around that," Wharton says.
Since then, he’s made coaching stops with the Panthers, Washington Commanders and is in his first year with the Ravens. But, for him, none of that would have been possible without his four years at USC.
“The biggest thing the University of South Carolina provided was that whole foundation for us to develop, whether it's coaching or playing,” Wharton says. “But you had the right people in place. I think that's critical. You have the right people in place to help you develop.”