Clemson’s latest stumble has the kind of number line that sticks in your head: 51-10 at LSU, 503 yards allowed, just 75 yards gained by the end of the third quarter. On a Saturday night watched by a peak audience of 8.7 million, it wasn’t just a loss. It was a national beating, and it landed as the most-watched game of Week 1.
And once again, Dabo Swinney reached for the same familiar comfort - the résumé.
When asked this week about fixing what’s gone wrong, Swinney leaned on past Clemson teams that had taken their lumps and eventually recovered.
"I've been in several of those games," Swinney said earlier this week, according to Austin Hannon of 247 Sports. "What was it, 54-14 out here in 2013, and we went 11-2, finished eighth in the country.
You have to go play the next one. We won in the playoff 30-0 - we weren't 30-0 better, but we were that day.
Circumstances in the game, things happen: the ball don't always bounce the way you want it in football. National championship, 44-16 - ain't no way we're 44-16 better.
That ain't far from 51-10 now. We ran into a buzzsaw; it's just that simple."
That explanation may sound better in a press room than it did on the field, where Clemson looked overwhelmed from the start. The Tigers have now lost their season opener in four straight years, and those games have produced a grim 130-30 scoring margin.
The frustration around Clemson isn’t just about one ugly night in Baton Rouge. It’s the pattern.
Last year, the Tigers opened with a loss, dropped two of their first three, and triggered fresh questions about whether they were slipping out of the sport’s top tier. Swinney responded the way he often does - by pointing to everything Clemson has already done.
"All we've done is win," Swinney said during a fiery press conference, according to Andrea Adelson of ESPN. "We've won this league eight out of the last 10 years.
Is that not good? I'm just asking.
Is that good? To win your league eight out of 10 years, to go to the playoffs seven out of 10 years, be in four national championships, win it twice.
Yeah, we're a little down right now. Take your shots.
I've got a long memory. We'll be all right.
We'll bounce back."
Clemson did not exactly bounce back. The Tigers lost their next home game to Syracuse, a team that finished the season by dropping its final eight. Clemson wound up 7-6, Swinney’s worst record since 2010.
Even with an unlikely ACC title and a surprising playoff berth in 2024, the broader trend has been hard to ignore. Clemson has now lost at least four games in each of the last three seasons, after a 12-year run without reaching that mark.
That’s a big shift for a program that spent most of the 2010s sitting near the center of the sport’s power structure, alongside Alabama. Swinney built that run with top-10 recruiting classes and a steady stream of NFL talent. But college football changed around him, and he was slow - then stubborn - about changing with it.
NIL and the transfer portal rewrote the rules. Swinney didn’t embrace them quickly, and his loyalty has become part of the story too.
This offseason’s clearest example came with his decision to hire Chad Morris to help repair last year’s broken offense. Morris had been successful as Clemson’s offensive coordinator from 2011-14, but he hadn’t called plays in six years and had spent the previous season out of coaching while watching his son play quarterback at Virginia.
The same approach showed up in the roster construction. Swinney resisted the transfer portal from 2018-22 before finally dipping in more heavily this offseason. Even then, he left the quarterback room untouched and went with Christopher Vizzina, a junior who had already been in the program for three years.
Against LSU, Vizzina finished with 83 yards, an interception, and a 13.9 quarterback rating. The offensive line made life even harder. Still, the choice to enter a season with Vizzina as QB1 said plenty about how far Clemson’s standards have slipped from the Deshaun Watson and Trevor Lawrence days.
Swinney had also been playing the same greatest-hits track at ACC Kickoff in July, making clear he didn’t feel a need to prove anything with another title.
"Well, most people don't have one (national title) and probably never will get one. So I don't really feel like I gotta go win another national title to prove anything to anybody," Swinney told David Ubben and Ralph Russo of The Athletic in July.
"I just wanna focus on the things that really drive me, and that is impacting these guys' lives, truly fulfilling the purpose that we have in our program. Nobody wants to win more than me.
And we've won 11 (conference and national) championships in the last 15 years. I think the next closest coach has six."
That leaves Clemson in a difficult spot. Swinney is the winningest coach in program history, and his buyout is more than $50 million. Coaches with multiple national titles do not usually get pushed out unless something extraordinary forces the issue.
So the Tigers are stuck trying to preserve what’s left of their national standing while led by a coach who still carries the past like a shield. The roster is probably good enough to avoid a full collapse, and the ACC doesn’t figure to help expose them much further. But for now, Clemson looks like a program hanging on to old promises while the sport keeps moving on.
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