Clemson’s first three games of 2026 have come with a weather wrinkle every time, and the Tigers are not alone.
The latest delay hit in the middle of Clemson’s 28-20 win over North Carolina on Sept. 19, when the game was suspended with 8:11 left in the fourth quarter and didn’t restart until more than two hours later. That followed a season opener at LSU on Sept. 5 that was delayed before pregame warmups, and a Sept. 12 home opener against Georgia Southern that was pushed back by more than two hours before kickoff.
For Dabo Swinney, the run has been hard to miss.
“It's crazy. I've never seen anything like it,” Clemson coach Dabo Swinney said.
The Tigers’ delays have become part of a bigger conversation across college football and beyond. On the same day as Clemson-UNC, Florida State at Alabama, BYU at Colorado State and Charlotte at Appalachian State were all delayed.
An NFL game between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Cleveland Browns was also delayed on Sept. 20.
That wave of interruptions has sparked plenty of reaction online, including a post on X from Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy that has drawn 1.3 million views since Sept. 20.
But John Jensenius, a lightning safety specialist, says the inconvenience comes with real risk.
Jensenius, who worked with the National Weather Service for more than 41 years before retiring in 2019, has tracked lightning fatalities since 2006 and helped launch the first national Lightning Safety Awareness Week. When the NWS shifted away from weather-specific campaigns, he founded the National Lightning Safety Council in 2015 to keep pushing lightning safety awareness.
He has documented 532 lightning fatalities from 2006-2025, including 45 at sporting events.
Lightning procedures are not new. Jensenius said the NCAA first included them in its 1997-98 sports medicine handbook, and the current handbook calls for schools to build lightning safety plans into their emergency action plans. Those plans include stopping activity when strikes are within a certain radius, providing shelter for fans and making sure delays and evacuations are communicated clearly.
Jensenius said the sense that delays are piling up comes from a few places, including more coverage and better detection tools.
“We're able to more efficiently track these things and make these smarter decisions about delaying sporting events,” he said. “It's a question I ask myself: Is it more there are more delays, or are they just being reported more? And I think both are true.”
He also pointed to the way the sport has moved earlier on the calendar. Clemson had played only one August game before 2000 - a 45-0 loss at UNC on Aug. 31, 1996 - but has played eight more since then, including back-to-back seasons in 2024 and 2025. The Tigers will play their earliest calendar-date game ever on Aug. 28, 2027, against Georgia State next season.
A new scheduling format removed the waiver-based Week 0, making the Aug. 28 weekend the standard opening week of the 2027 college football season.
“The earlier they start, the more apt they are to have a thunderstorm,” Jensenius said.
Not everyone sees every delay as necessary in the moment, especially when the sky looks manageable. During Clemson’s delay against North Carolina, the weather over Memorial Stadium appeared at least partly clear. ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit questioned that dynamic on his Sept. 21 podcast.
“I’ve been in a couple games this year when there’s been lightning delays, and I’m like … I see blue skies over here,” he said. “Never mind these blue skies, we’re gonna take a two hour delay.”
Jensenius pushed back on that line of thinking, saying it can ignore how dangerous lightning can be even when a storm doesn’t look close.
“They didn't sense the threat that there was a storm nearby, and people were struck and killed,” he said.
The National Weather Service refers to that as a “bolt from the blue,” and says lightning has been documented as far as 25 miles from the actual storm cloud.
For Jensenius, the tradeoff is simple: safety rules are built to reduce danger, even if they slow everything down.
“if you don't want to take a risk, you're going to have to be inconvenienced a lot,” he said. “And if you're not willing to be inconvenienced, you're going to take a risk.”
At Clemson, the process is tightly managed. Senior associate athletic director for communications Jeff Kallin said the school follows NCAA and ACC policy in building its lightning safety plan.
“To get 80,000 people to safety, I know sometimes people want to say, ‘Hey, where is the lightning?’” Kallin said. “But the ability to move that many people safely and and quickly, and not create additional safety issues by rushing through and having everybody out, that's a really important thing.”
Clemson tracks lightning from the public safety command center at the university’s police department building, while an operations team at Memorial Stadium also monitors conditions. Kallin said the police department side usually makes the final call.
The eight-mile radius is measured from the 50-yard line at Memorial Stadium. Once a strike is detected inside that zone, the delay procedures begin, and fans are directed to shelter at Littlejohn Coliseum, the Advanced Materials Innovation Complex building and Fike recreation center. Fans may also stay in their vehicles.
The school passes along updates in the stadium, on social media, through radio broadcasts and via push notifications. In a mid-game delay like the one against UNC, Kallin said field personnel can be told within seconds.
Once the game is cleared to resume, the teams have to agree on warmup time. Clemson and North Carolina warmed up for 10 minutes before restarting.
“It can really depend on every situation. It's always different,” Kallin said. “This week there was a little bit of a wait because the eight miles stayed in place for a while, but then it was a pretty quick restart.”
Clemson’s next trip comes Friday at Cal in Berkeley, Calif., with kickoff set for 10:30 PM EDT. According to AccuWeather, the forecast calls for a zero-percent chance of thunderstorms.
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