Is Clemson the next football dynasty?
Tigers poised to take over as college football’s dominant program
CLEMSON, S.C. – The orange blazer comes out of Dabo Swinney’s closet only a few times a year, but a Wednesday that included five-star recruits finalizing their paperwork followed by a Clemson graduation event followed by practice for another College Football Playoff game was reason enough to start the day in celebratory attire.
And just after 11 a.m., Swinney sat down at a table inside Clemson’s practice facility, where a large black-andgold banner signifying the 2016 national championship now hangs. Immediately, he was asked a question not about the looming Sugar Bowl matchup with Alabama but rather an offensive tackle named Jackson Carman, the No. 1-ranked recruit in Ohio whom Clemson had just secured a commitment from moments earlier when he chose the Tigers over the in-state Buckeyes.
Swinney looked over his left shoulder toward longtime sports information director Tim Bourret, who advised him that the actual Letter of Intent had not yet come in. So Swinney had to pass on the question per NCAA rules, which is about the only way you can stop him from commenting on anything.
But nevertheless, with about six minutes to go in the news conference, Bourret interrupted a question to inform Swinney that Carman’s paperwork had come in. “Oh, we do?” Swinney said, breaking into a big smile. “Jackson Carman! Action Jackson! Let’s go! Press conference, take two!”
It was a perfect Swinney moment: goofy, endearing and yet quite representative of why the Tigers have transformed themselves from perceived onehit wonder on the national stage to a program that stands on the precipice of altering college football history.
“No. 1 player in Ohio, No. 1 player in Florida, No. 1 player in South Carolina, No. 1 player in Georgia,” Swinney said, succinctly describing the recruiting haul on Wednesday and the reach its brand now has across the country.
By now, the message to the rest of college football is loud and clear. Clemson isn’t going anywhere. The falloff that was allegedly supposed to happen this season when the last group of superstars exited didn’t materialize. The Tigers won the Atlantic Coast Conference again with almost an entirely different roster, made the Playoff for the third year in a row and, when healthy, have looked like the best team in the country over the balance of the season.
Now here comes another group of recruits led by Trevor Lawrence, the top-ranked quarterback out of Cartersville, Ga., and the title window is suddenly wide open again for the foreseeable future. In fact, Clemson’s sustainability is such old news at this point, Swinney doesn’t even bother anymore to push back on the tired narrative that his program is a fleeting power.
But what could change for Clemson, and for all of college football, will be determined on New Year’s Day in a third consecutive Playoff matchup against the Crimson Tide. Now the stakes for Clemson aren’t just about hanging another banner after a 35-year wait. What lies ahead is nothing less than an opportunity to change the way we talk and think about this entire era of the sport.
Alabama’s decade
The balance of power can be a delicate, fleeting thing. Periods of dominance burn hot, then fade. History tells us that half of the traditional bluebloods at any given time are ascending while the other half are wandering in the wilderness before rising again.
The current decade has been kindest to Alabama, a dynasty longer and more durable than its recent predecessors. When you look back at the Nick Saban run of four national championships in nine years, rewriting the modern history of the sport, there have been three major inflection points:
1. In 2009, Alabama beats Florida for the Southeastern Conference title, simultaneously launching Saban to his first national championship at Alabama and effectively ending Urban Meyer’s run with the Gators after it seemed like the two programs could have a long rivalry at the top.
2. Les Miles builds a machine at LSU that is practically Alabama’s equal, but the Tide’s dominant 21-0 victory in the 2011 national championship game — a rematch of LSU’s 9-6 victory that season — sends the Tigers into a spiral and solidifies Alabama’s aura as a program without peer.
3. Ohio State beats Alabama in 2014 and goes on to win the first College Football Playoff, sparking a legitimate argument about whether Meyer might join or pass Saban in the Greatest Of All-Time debate. At that point, Meyer had three titles to Saban’s four and the preseason No. 1 team in 2015. Instead, Alabama wins another national championship that year and Meyer hasn’t come close
since, ending any notion they were part of the same conversation.
That’s important context as we turn our focus to this year’s Playoff and what seems like a fourth historic marker in the era of Alabama.
If Clemson wins a second consecutive national championship and beats the Tide two years in a row along the way, it would mean a legitimate claim to their own dynasty.
It would mean Clemson making a run at Alabama as the program of the decade. It would mean Clemson, in college football’s most impressive development in quite some time, becoming an equal in an era when it seemed Saban simply wouldn’t allow any.
“It’s the tiebreaker,” linebacker Dorian O’Daniel said. “Last season there was a lot of doubt in how we won games, how we got to the Playoff. This year we’ve tried to leave no doubt.”
In a sense, maybe the perception change already happened regardless of the outcome in the Sugar Bowl.
This will be the third consecutive year Alabama and Clemson have met in the Playoff, and the first two games came down to coin-flip margins, with each taking home a hard-fought national championship trophy.
But to really be like Alabama, it’s not just the outcome of a 60-minute football game, it’s the benefit of the doubt that goes along with the brand. No matter who graduates or leaves Alabama for the pros or gets plugged in at quarterback, you just assume they’re going to be in the mix every year until Saban decides he’s had enough.
Clemson has earned the right to be regarded the same way, having lost the best player in school history in quarterback Deshaun Watson as part of a complete roster overhaul while still motoring along as if nothing really changed.
Trying to go back-to-back
Repeating as national champions would be the ultimate testament, as it’s only been done a handful of times in the modern era. The Playoff adds another hurdle, as programs now have to win two postseason games against elite opponents rather than just one bowl.
On paper, this is the most evenly matched Playoff field as both semifinal matchups currently have point spreads of less than a field goal. (Alabama has been a slight favorite in Las Vegas.)
“I know they’re the four seed and this is supposed to be the easy draw, right?” Swinney joked. “But when you play Alabama, there’s a good chance you get beat. That’s just life.”
Swinney was trying to make the point that for all the story lines about the Alabama-Clemson Playoff trilogy and trying to go back-to-back, the outcome of one 60-minute football game won’t change his view about where his program sits in the pecking order or what its future holds. And that’s completely fair.
But history is written by the winners, and Clemson has the opportunity to reshape a good portion of it by reaching arguably the most difficult accomplishment in all of sports.
“We’ve seen Alabama do it before,” defensive end Clelin Ferrell said. “We understand that going back-to-back has been hard for a lot of other teams, but this is a new era. We feel like we’re real young in the era, so why not us?”