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3 reasons why the 2023 season could be the beginning of the end for Clemson Tigers football
Story by Shane Shoemaker • Yesterday 5:04 PM
7/6/23© Shane Shoemaker
The Clemson Tigers football program is entering a peculiar season this year. For the last several seasons, the Tigers have been one of the perennial favorites to win the College Football Playoff Championship. This year, not only are they not one of the top-3 favorites to win the College Football Playoff, they’re not even the clear favorites to win their own conference. By no means have the darlings of the ACC fell off, but they aren’t quite the clear favorites they once were just a few seasons ago.
Currently, the Tigers have the seventh best odds (+1600) to win it all, according to FanDuel. In year’s past, Clemson was typically within the top-4, if not top-2. That could be because teams like USC and LSU, who are favored just ahead of Clemson, are on the upswing. So, does that then mean Clemson is treading downward? Are we now seeing the Tigers football program coming back down to ground level after so many years of being on top, consistently playing for national championships? Or is it just because those teams are the new flavor of the month?
Clemson will undoubtedly still be a top-10 team to start the season, but that seems a far distance from their usual top-5 they have become accustomed to in years past. This team is still very talented, as head coach Dabo Swinney, entering his fourteenth season, has continued to recruit well. But with some glaring issues arising, Clemson could be on the verge of missing the College Football Playoff for the third consecutive season.
New coordinators
Swinney is introducing yet another new coordinator coming into 2023, his third in two years. This time, it’s on the offensive side of the ball, with the hiring of Garrett Riley, the younger brother of Lincoln, from national championship runner-up, TCU. Riley will be replacing Brandon Streeter, who took over from Tony Elliott in 2021 after Elliott took the head coaching position at Virginia. This comes also just a year after Swinney lost his longtime defensive coordinator, Brent Venables to Oklahoma.For a program that has had stability at some of its most important coaching positions, it’s starting to look a little bit like a carousel. Consistency has been key at Clemson during their impressive run, whether that be from player personnel to coaching staff. Now, it seems, that Swinney is trying to learn how to adjust to the fast, every-changing landscape in college football on all fronts.
Refusing to take advantage of the transfer portal
One major concern for Clemson heading into the 2023 season is their inability to effectively utilize the transfer portal. Given the reputation of Clemson football, it’s easy to believe that Swinney could nearly pick and choose which players he wanted every season out of the portal. Swinney isn’t adhering much to this concept, though.The transfer portal has become such an important tool for teams to address roster needs and acquire talent, to where in some cases, it has completely reshaped a roster. Teams are making turnarounds in their programs faster than ever before, or in the case of the usual powerhouses, making them even stronger. Clemson, under Swinney’s stubborn guise and disgust for a lot of the current happenings in college football, continues to be reluctant to embrace this new source of acquiring talent, however. Since its inception in April of 2021, Clemson has only brought in three transfers while losing 28 players to other programs, including six in 2023. This lack of activity in the transfer portal could limit their ability to fill gaps on their roster and address key positions of need.
As the growing impact of the transfer portal continues, this could be a cause of separation between other teams and Clemson in the future, if not currently. As strong of a recruiter as Swinney is due in part to Clemson’s recent success, the Tigers are missing out on a clear advantage of making their team’s better every year.
Losing trend?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/spo...-few-odd-reunions/vi-AA1cB4UX?ocid=entnewsntp
Coincidentally, looking back to 2021, that also perhaps set off another trend. Over the last two seasons, the Clemson football program has lost a total of six games. In comparison to the year they began their dominating run in 2015, their first College Football Playoff appearance, through 2020, they lost a total of seven games in six seasons.
In the past nine seasons, the only team that has kept Clemson out of the ACC Championship game was Pitt, who beat them back in 2021, along with NC State. The only other loss that season was an out-of-conference game against Georgia. All three of Clemson’s losses last season were to out-of-conference opponents, that included Notre Dame — who they also lost to back in 2020 — South Carolina and Tennessee in a bowl game.
Clemson hasn’t beaten a Power-5 school since 2021, which was in-state rival South Carolina. For some teams, that would be considered a great accomplishment, as it wasn’t that long ago, but not for this era of Clemson football. Because not only did Clemson lose to South Carolina last season for the first time since 2013, they lost at home, ending their 40 game at-home winning streak.
That game perhaps proved to be detrimental to the Tigers, carrying over into their Orange Bowl game against a Tennessee Volunteers team that had made drastic improvements in 2022. The Tigers were simply outplayed on both sides of the ball by the Volunteers in Miami and never looked like they belonged in the game, losing 31-14.
The only Power-5 out-of-conference matchups on the Clemson schedule this season are familiar ones — Notre Dame and South Carolina. They’ll host the Fighting Irish but have to make the two-and-half hour trek southeast to Williams-Brice Stadium, making for an interesting beginning and ending to November.
Recruiting comparisons to previous national champions
Under Dabo Swinney, Clemson has been one of the best recruited schools in the nation over the last decade and a half. The talent has been evident by the 17 first-round draft picks since Swinney took over, among a plethora other, later round picks. Those crops of talent are what earned the Tigers two national championships, while playing for two more in a span of four years. However, Clemson hasn’t played in the championship game since 2019, where they lost LSU by 17, and haven’t appeared in the College Football Playoff since the following year, losing to Ohio State in the semi-finals by 21.Outside a six point win against Iowa State in 2021 in the Cheez-It Bowl, that means Clemson has lost two out of their last three postseason games with their last win before that coming in their 2018 National Championship victory over Alabama.
So, what’s the problem?
Let’s look at Clemson’s recruiting over the last four cycles, per 247sports.
| Clemson recruiting cycles: |
| 2019 – 9th (2019) |
| 2020 – 3rd (2020) |
| 2021- 4th (2021) |
| 2022 – 14th (2022) |
| Four-year average rank: 7.5 |
| Georgia – 2021, 2022 | Alabama – 2020 | LSU – 2019 |
| 2018-19 – 1st & 2nd | 2020 – 2nd | 2019 – 6th |
| 2020 – 1st | 2019 – 1st | 2018 – 15th |
| 2021 – 4th | 2018 – 5th | 2017 – 7th |
| 2022 – 3rd | 2017 – 1st | 2016 – 3rd |
| Four-year average rank: 2.5 & 2 | 2.25 | 7.75 |
It’s too way too early to tell if Clemson is truly trending downward, but there should be concerns if you’re a Tigers fan. It’s issues like these that can cause massive separation and maybe the beginning of the end for their dynasty.
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