Every time I turn on SportsCenter or Championship Drive or CFB Daily or College Football Live, they are talking about Clemson.
If you flip over to some of ESPN’s competitors, they are doing the same. When the Heisman Trophy is brought up, there again is Clemson. On the cover of my Sports Illustrated this week … You guessed it, it’s Clemson.
Right now, Clemson is everywhere. The Tigers are the nation’s No. 1 team with perhaps the nation’s best player promoting the school everywhere.
From New York to Los Angeles anyone who loves college football is talking about Clemson. And you know what, Clemson could not ask for a better advertisement, and it is not costing them a dime.
Dabo Swinney’s slip of the tongue in promising a pizza party for 20,000 of his closest friends might have been a headache for Clemson’s marketing department initially, but the benefits and publicity that followed it has far exceeded any of their expectations.
“This is unbelievable,” Swinney yelled to the more than 20,000 fans to watch the College Football Playoff Selection Show at Death Valley on Sunday morning, less than 12 hours after the Tigers won its 15th ACC Championship.
“This has to be a first. I know sometimes I open my mouth. My mama is here today and she has been telling me to shut my mouth since I was a baby, but this is incredible. It’s incredible,” Swinney continued. “About seven weeks ago everybody wanted to make a big deal about the poll and I said, ‘We are not worried about a poll. On December 6, that is the only poll that matters and if we are where we need to be we will have the biggest poll-pizza party celebration you have ever seen.’
“Let me just tell you, nobody does it like Clemson. I promise you. There is going to be four teams in this thing today and no one else is going to be doing what we are doing in Clemson, South Carolina.”
And because no one does it like Clemson the Tigers are being talked about all over the place. Sure, the prognosticators are already favoring No. 4 Oklahoma to knock off the top-ranked Tigers in the Orange Bowl, but what else is new.
People have been predicting Clemson’s demise since the Louisville game in Week 3. Then they said the Tigers surely could not beat Notre Dame, and when they did well they will surely pull a “Clemson” and will have a letdown or stumble against a Georgia Tech, Boston College or Miami.
When Clemson did not fall into the “trap” at Raleigh, it was inevitable that Dalvin Cook and Florida State would own the Tigers like they have the last three seasons, but the Tigers passed that one last great test with flying colors. But hold on, with the ACC Atlantic Division all wrapped up, “Clemson could stumble in one of these final three games before the ACC Championship Game,” some said. But once again, though not pretty, the Tigers took care of business in beating Syracuse, Wake Forest and South Carolina.
All we heard last week was how Clemson’s worn out defense could not keep up with a North Carolina offense that was scoring on every team and made it look easy. But Clemson’s defense held the Tar Heels to a season-low in yards and rushing yards and proved they were clearly the better team.
So now the Tigers, according to those same prognosticators, are the underdog, again, in the national semifinals. Despite beating Oklahoma, 40-6, in last year’s Russell Athletic Bowl—the same Sooner defense that gave up 319 passing yards to a guy not named Deshaun Watson—the experts are now saying Clemson cannot beat this Baker Mayfield led Oklahoma team. “The Sooners are playing better than anyone in the country,” they say.
Even better than the only team in the country that is undefeated?
So here we are again. Another big game for Clemson and another predicted loss. It was the same talk before the 2012 Chick-fil-A Bowl against LSU. It was the same talk before the 2014 Orange Bowl against Ohio State and it was the same talk before last year’s Russell Athletic Bowl.
Clemson has heard it all year. But in all of those instances, in the end, all they could talk about was Clemson. Just like this entire regular season, in the end, they had no choice but to talk about Clemson and you can’t pay for better advertisement than that.