CLEMSON - At Clemson, the cannon is more than a game-day flourish. It is the crack that sends the Tigers down the hill, the blast that cuts through the noise, and a piece of school tradition tied directly to the university’s military roots.
Each fall, the scene builds the same way: players gather atop the grassy hill, rub Howard’s Rock and prepare to charge toward their opponent. Fans rise.
The music swells. Dabo Swinney sprints toward midfield.
And then comes the sound that really starts it all - the booming shot from the cannon that echoes across Frank Howard Field.
That cannon has been part of Clemson football since the 1950s, when Tigers cheerleader George Bennett introduced the idea. Bennett later became the Executive Director of IPTAY, and over the decades the cannon became inseparable from home games.
For the past four years, the man behind it has been ROTC officer Brendan Miller, who fires it to trigger the hill run and again after every Clemson touchdown.
“A senior in the (ROTC) program called me on a game day morning in 2022, and I was about to go tailgate,” Miller said. “He told me to get my uniform and go to our headquarters, and I was like, ‘Why? I'm about to go out and tailgate,’ and he said, ‘Do you want to shoot the cannon or not?’”
For Miller, a lifelong Clemson athletics fan, there was no real decision to make. Tailgating could wait.
The cannon could not. He ended up handling the job at most home games over the next four seasons, through wins and losses alike.
The cannon fits naturally into a broader pattern at Clemson, where military recognition is built into the athletic calendar. Once a year, the football team plays its Military Appreciation Game, wearing purple jerseys and taking part in a parade with ROTC members and active duty units. The day also includes a flyover before kickoff and an armed forces medley at halftime.
That connection goes back to Clemson’s founding as a military school in 1889, when leaders believed “a military atmosphere produced the highest academic excellence,” and made patriotism one of the school’s six core values.
“To have a university whose core value is still patriotism, is extremely rare for a non-military academy school,” Miller said. “So just like the way that athletics is continuously paying respects to its history and never forgetting its past and honoring those who gave it all.”
The school’s military identity has remained visible for generations, from 6,500 alumni who served in World War II to ring ceremonies that once included a presentation from the late Colonel Ben Skardon, a Bataan Death March survivor.
Miller has now become part of that story himself. After finishing ROTC training last school year, the Cornelius, N.C., native went to Fort Still, Okla., as a second lieutenant in the army. After a few months of training, he will be stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C., as a field artillery officer for the 82nd Airborne Division.
That means a future far more dangerous than the one he spent at Clemson, where his job was to fire a single cannon on Saturdays.
Before leaving campus, Miller also got to carry the tradition into baseball season. Clemson fired the cannon for the first time this year during a Heroes Weekend series against Army in February, a weekend packed with military tributes.
One game featured dog tags with the names of 498 Clemson alumni killed in action placed on a portable memorial wall at home plate. The day before, head coach Erik Bakich presented Army with an American flag made of baseball bats.
During each game, Tigers players and Army players also went to shake hands with veterans in the middle of the fourth inning, a tradition that began in 2025.
“Us being a former military school and patriotism is one of our core values, and our fans have an opportunity to put their arm around those guys and shake their hands,” Bakich said. “I think it’s very special as well, them being able to recognize the veterans that have walked in the footsteps of what they’re about to walk in.”
Clemson scored 17 runs that day, and Miller ran out of shells to fire, a first.
Now, with Miller and 40 of his ROTC brethren moving on to serve outside the Upstate, Clemson will need a new hand on the cannon. But Miller knows the tradition will keep rolling.
When he returns to visit, he expects the cannon - and Clemson’s military support - to still be there.
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