I am rooting for Clemson to reach another CFP championship game.
Maybe I won’t like them as much in a couple of years, but right now what Dabo Swinney is doing with the Tigers is cool on and off the field. Swinney has become the best interview among head coaches in the ACC if not the country, even though he sometimes strikes back at criticism of his program too hard when he should just laugh it off.
The Tigers have almost matched Florida State’s domination of the game when the Seminoles had a ridiculous double-digit streak of top four seasons in the polls and won two national titles.
But in the College Football Championship playoff era, Clemson is now in its fifth straight semifinals and has hoisted two of the last three trophies. Swinney virtually came out of nowhere as the Tigers’ interim head coach and built a dynasty behind top-five recruiting classes, with another best-in-the ACC class for next year.
IPTAY, which used to stand for “I Pay Ten Dollars A Year,” is the fundraising club whose acronym now means more like Ten Thousand A Year, with hundreds of members paying a lot more than that. It has helped Clemson pay its coordinators at least a million bucks annually and construct unparalleled facilities that make Death Valley seem more like Disneyland to wide-eyed recruits.
Despite all his success, Swinney has that “oh, shucks” attitude and says silly stuff like, “If we can do this at little old Clemson, any school can do it.” Not exactly, since Clemson had more potential in so many grassroots givers and millionaire donors, and it keeps increasing.
But it’s still a cool story how they go from a DeShaun Watson to a Trevor Lawrence as national championship quarterbacks, and the rest of their size, speed and overall football talent is off the charts. Dabo admits his team, and sophomore Lawrence, got off to slow starts this season but insists the Tigers all together are playing better football than the 2018 squad that won it all.
There is no question Clemson got the toughest draw, having to play Ohio State on Saturday night in far-away Phoenix, while top-seed LSU gets fourth-seeded Oklahoma in Atlanta, with its fans happily driving across Alabama to get there. But Clemson has beaten the odds twice, and the Tigers will do it again come Monday, January 13.
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