Tigers, Sooners match up with eyes on validation
Each year in his first team meeting, Clemson coach Dabo Swinney informs the Tigers how long it has been since the school won its only national title — it has been 34 years now since that magical 1981 team — and then moves on to the team’s five goals:
Win the season opener. Win the Atlantic Coast Conference’s Atlantic Division. Win the “state championship” — which means beating South Carolina. Win the ACC. Win the bowl game.
“If we can achieve those goals consistently, we’re gonna have a great program,” Swinney says.
In Swinney’s seventh full season as coach, the Tigers have achieved those goals. And with a berth in the College Football Playoff, it’s clear: Clemson is a great program. But one piece is missing. Swinney has always proclaimed that if his team could achieve all those goals in a season, “We’re gonna win it all.”
“But I didn’t know they were gonna change the rules on me,” says Swinney, referring to the advent of the College Football Play-
off. “Now, if we win our bowl game, we just get a chance to play for it all.”
The Orange Bowl winner will have that opportunity. But ask Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops, who clearly understands there aren’t any guarantees — either here in South Florida or, for the winner, in the next round.
Years ago, when his program was young and Stoops was fresh off winning the national title, he found himself at a Christmas party with former Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer. The talk turned to Switzer’s long, successful run. Stoops knew the Sooners had won three national championships. But informed that Switzer’s teams had played for three more, Stoops was incredulous:
“You mean you could have won six of ’em?” he said — and then got a tonguelashing in reply. It wasn’t quite this clean, but it went something like this:
“You think you’re gonna win every one of ’ em,” Switzer told Stoops, “you’ve got another thing coming.”
Fifteen years after that Bowl Championship Series national title, Stoops is the winningest coach in Oklahoma’s storied history, ahead of Switzer and fellow legend Bud Wilkinson. But another thing has come. Since winning it all, Oklahoma has played for three more national titles — but Stoops is still looking for his second.
“It took me a few years,” says Stoops, meaning until he recognized Switzer was correct. “Hopefully he hasn’t jinxed me. Hopefully we can get another one here.”
Or rather, next month in Glendale, Ariz., against the winner of the Cotton Bowl. But you get his meaning. As Oklahoma and Clemson meet in a Playoff semifinal, they’re on different journeys with the same goal: validation.
Since Swinney got a surprise promotion in 2008, moving from interim coach to head coach, Clemson has gradually been transformed into an elite power. The Tigers hadn’t won the ACC since 1991 or 10 games in a season since 1990.
Under Swinney, Clemson is 74-26. At 13-0 this season — one more victory than those unbeaten 1981 national champions had — and sitting atop all the polls, the Tigers have finally shed the perception that they’re more of a tease than a true power.
“We’re definitely one of the top programs in the country,” Swinney says. “We’re not going away.”
In his 17th season, Stoops shares the current mark for longest continuous tenure with Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz. The Sooners have won at least 10 games in 13 seasons, and nine Big 12 titles — which means under Stoops they’ve won the conference more years than they haven’t. But since losing to Florida in the 2009 BCS title game, the program had clearly slipped a notch. A fade to 8-5 last season led to serious questions about its trajectory.
“It’s pretty evident a lot of that isn’t true, that we’ve got a strong program,” Stoops says. “It wasn’t nearly as weak as people wanted to say it was a year ago.”
But Stoops re-evaluated the program, revamping his staff and changing the offense in the offseason. Recharged and riding a seven-game winning streak, the Sooners vaulted into the Playoff. And it’s telling that Stoops calls 2015 “one of my really all-time favorite years” and compares this team favorably to the 2000 national championship team.
“It’s great to be in this position, chasing the national championship so late in the year,” he says.
The seasons for Clemson and Oklahoma have been filled with superlatives, special at each school for different reasons. But for each, they’re incomplete.
This year, when Swinney told the Tigers it had been 34 years since that 1981 national title, he added one thing, asking them: Do you want to be the team that ends that streak? It’s clear these Tigers might just be that team. And these Sooners could very well be the bunch that wins Stoops’ second national title.
Winning the Orange Bowl wouldn’t get either program there. Not since they’ve changed the rules. But it would be one step closer to validation.