Before home games, Clemson football participates in a tradition some have called “the most exciting 25 seconds in college football.” 

In 2016, ESPN’s Chris Fowler went so far as to say, “If you are lucky enough to ever witness this, you will not forget it. It is perhaps the greatest entrance in sports.” 

For those unfamiliar, the players and coaches enter the stadium by running down a massive hill. In the process of running down The Hill, they rub Howard’s Rock because of the mythical powers it supposedly gives players. 

The Rock was first placed on its pedestal at the top of the hill on September 24, 1966, a game Clemson won 40-35 over Virginia. The team started rubbing the Rock before every home game the following season, and the tradition was born.

Flash forward to today, and Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney feels as synonymous with Tiger football as running down The Hill and Howard’s Rock. He’s the architect of Clemson’s modern stretch of dominance. He put them on the map. And he’s won a lot of football games… more than the guy the rock was named after, which says something.

But in recent years, the Clemson football program has become a shell of what it once was. Last year in particular was a tremendous failure. The Tigers had a loaded roster of high-value returners and future NFL talent. They had a favorable schedule and a relatively clear path to the ACC title. And seemingly everyone was buying the hype, picking Clemson as a national title contender. Then the bottom fell out early.

Clemson dropped its massive season opener to LSU, with the loss looking worse and worse each week as the other Tigers from Death Valley regressed and eventually fired their coach. Losses against Georgia Tech and Syracuse followed. Clemson blinked, and its season was over before it ever got started.

Entering the 2026 season, Clemson and Swinney just might be at a crossroads. Swinney’s reluctance to use the transfer portal to its fullest capabilities has held this program back. The Tigers just lost a whole swath of NFL-caliber players to this April’s draft. And now, other ACC programs have surpassed Clemson on the national stage.

In the modern era of NIL and the transfer portal, college football has erased the “our kinda guys” way of winning. While the rest of the sport adapted, Swinney has watched the fortress he built slowly morph into a museum, as a difficult reminder of what dominance used to look like.

Now is the time to ask the uncomfortable question: Does Clemson still belong among the sport’s elites? Or are the Tigers, under Swinney, marching into obscurity? 

Swinney turned Clemson into a monster. In 18 years at the helm, he’s amassed a staggering 187-53 record, won a pair of national championships, and notched 12-straight seasons with double-digit wins. During that timeframe, the Tigers have been the boogeyman of the ACC, so much so that it felt surprising when they weren’t the league leaders. 

He and “his kinda guys” have done an excellent job on the recruiting trail, especially during the Tigers’ heyday during the 2010s. Tajh Boyd, Deshaun Watson, and Trevor Lawrence did an awful lot of winning at Clemson, and Swinney deserves a ton of credit for that. 

But in recent seasons, Clemson’s dominance has started to slip. In 2023, Clemson went just 9-4. In 2024, the Tigers did make the College Football Playoff, but lost by two touchdowns to Texas. Last season, the Tigers fell flat before they ever got started en route to a 7-6 finish, punctuated by a brutal Pinstripe Bowl loss to Penn State after James Franklin had already been fired. 

While there are plenty of mitigating factors as to why Clemson is no longer the ACC’s top dog, it’s difficult to deny the negative impact that Swinney’s transfer portal reticence has had on the program. 

Almost every other program in the country places a premium on acquiring transfer portal talent. Big programs feast on top-end talent from other big programs, while scooping up small school guys that they believe can play at a higher level. Small schools take swings on guys who don’t pan out at bigger programs and do what they can around the edges. 

Clemson has been slow to adapt to the new normal of college football. Three seasons ago, Clemson took in just one player from the transfer portal. Before the 2024 season, the Tigers famously took zero transfers. Last year’s team only had four transfers on the roster. This offseason, Clemson took a program high 10 players from the portal, all of whom were former three-stars.

Clemson’s stunning 2025 collapse was baffling in every sense of the word. 

Injuries plagued the Tigers at the skill positions and across the offensive line, but quarterback Cade Klubnik was flat-out ineffective. Entering the season, he was billed as a dual-threat weapon, but struggled to deliver when it mattered. 

On the other side of the ball, despite returning plenty of NFL-level talent and playing zero elite offenses all season, the Tigers only improved from 29th to 24th in Bill Connelly’s defensive SP+ rankings under defensive coordinator Tom Allen. 

Clemson’s opener at home against LSU was billed as a massive tilt. All eyes were on Death Valley for the prime time Saturday night game, but Clemson never clicked in any meaningful way. The Tigers’ offense came out sputtering, while the defense failed to get enough stops against, in retrospect, a struggling LSU offense. LSU didn’t look like world-beaters either, but Blake Baker’s defense did enough to limit Clemson to just 10 points, and it was enough for a big win.

The very next week, Clemson was put on early upset alert by Troy. Then came back-to-back losses at the hands of Syracuse (a team that didn’t win another game all season) and a fiery Georgia Tech team. The combination of ineffective offense and a leaky defense resulted in three quick losses, and the team never recovered. 

Looking ahead to the 2026 season, it’s clear that there is still plenty of talent on the Clemson roster. For the campaign to be successful, the Tigers will need to lean on their defense, at least initially, until the offense can get sorted out with both a new coordinator, Chad Morris, and quarterback, presumably Christopher Vizzina. Morris will be tasked with resurrecting a Clemson rushing attack that was virtually non-existent in 2025, ranking 103rd nationally in yards per rush after sacks. Vizzina could prove to be a worthy starter, but he’ll require some balance to succeed. The Tigers have a talented group of running backs and wide receivers; it’ll be up to Morris to assemble the pieces in a more efficient way.

Clemson does not have an easy schedule and must hit the ground running quickly with games against both LSU and Miami in the first five weeks of the regular season. The remaining path gets easier, but Swinney will need to reinforce his preseason optimism with an early season win to validate the vibes.

In the short term, Clemson needs to retool its tactics if it hopes for another invite to the College Football Playoff. Additions from the portal should help, especially on defense, and a returning crop of skill talent provides a solid launchpad.

Longer-term, if the Tigers want to get back among the nation’s elite, it won’t have anything to do with a magic rock or a grand entrance. It’ll be because Swinney, the man who made this program what it is today, fully leans into the modernity of the sport and finds a way to recapture what made Clemson hum. 

If he refuses, I urge Clemson fans to keep the lights on at the museum. The memories might be all that’s left.

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In our latest episode, we reacted to the first AP Top 25 of the 2026 season and our first preseason poll as official AP voters. We ran through the top of the rankings, compared the national poll with our own ballot and talked about what it felt like to put actual votes behind all the opinions we’ve spent the offseason developing. Which teams already look a little too high or too low, and how much should anyone really trust a preseason poll before the games begin?

Then it was time for some Zagriculture. We took a bank of familiar college football narratives and drafted the ones we’re most willing to push back against. Is Notre Dame really just a product of its schedule? Is Dabo Swinney actually cooked at Clemson? Can USC finally build a respectable defense under Lincoln Riley? What should we expect from Oregon when the biggest games arrive in January, and how much faith should anyone have in Lane Kiffin eventually delivering a championship at LSU? Along the way, we also wandered into Ole Miss, Iowa and several other preseason assumptions that may look very different a few months from now.

Plus, Ty got talked into an alarmingly specific Iowa offensive prediction, Dan dabbled with ultra weird phrasing, and we continued preparing for Week 0.

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