Last time Clemson played LSU, Clemsoning died and Dabo’s dynasty came into view

Clemson plays LSU in the National Championship Game and hopes for similar results to the 2012 Peach Bowl when the two Tigers last met.

The Clemson Tigers have one of the proudest histories in college football. Clemson has won over 750 games, won 19 ACC Championships, made the College Football Playoff five times in a row and will be playing for its fourth national title in school history on Jan. 13. Yet, Clemson wasn’t always the gold standard of college football. In fact, the Tigers were largely seen as a joke until recently.

From winning the 1981 National Championship under then-head coach Danny Ford, Clemson went 31 years between winning 11 games in a season. Though they won 10 games five times and five ACC Championships during those 31 seasons, the football team came to embody something best known as “Clemsoning.”

This was a football program for over 30 years defined by losing games it couldn’t afford to, against teams it shouldn’t in unspeakable ways. It started with Ford and clung onto the program through the Ken Hatfield era, the Tommy West era and most notably, the Tommy Bowden era. Clemson became a program that should have challenged for national championships but didn’t.

Admittedly, Ford did win at least 10 games in his final three years leading the program from 1987-1989. Hatfield won 10 games in 1990 and never did it again at Clemson. West never won more than eight games and Bowden won never more than nine. But when Bowden was fired midway through the 2008 NCAA season, we had no idea it would be the agent of change for the Tigers.

Taking over in the interim was former wide receivers coach Dabo Swinney. People initially scoffed at the move, figuring Clemson’s glory days were behind it and the program was never going to be great again. No, it was not easy for Swinney to turn this thing around. In fact, it took him four full seasons.

Everything changed for the Tigers after the 2012 Chick-fil-A Bowl when they met LSU.

2012 was a make-or-break year for Swinney at Clemson. Fortunately for him and the program, it broke in the right direction in their biggest game in years. Clemson went 10-2 (7-1) in the regular season. The Tigers’ only ACC loss was to the rival Florida State Seminoles. Clemson suffered loss No. 2 on the year to Steve Spurrier‘s South Carolina Gamecocks in the Palmetto Bowl.

At 10-2 (7-1), this set up a bowl game between No. 14 Clemson out of the ACC and the No. 8 LSU Tigers (10-2) out of the SEC in the 2012 Chick-fil-A Bowl. This formerly mid-tier bowl between the ACC and the SEC would give us good Southeastern matchups with little more than bragging rights on the line.

But the 2012 game changed the Clemson program and the bowl’s perception.

When these two teams met in Atlanta on New Year’s Eve 2012, LSU was 2011’s national runner-up to the Alabama Crimson Tide. LSU was gelling under then-head coach Les Miles and Clemson was coming off a 10-win season.

The Bayou Bengals were favored by four points though Clemson trailed 14-13 at halftime, this game just felt different for the Tigers. Down 24-13 heading into the fourth quarter, Clemson scored 12 unanswered points to upset LSU. Swinney had given Clemson an 11-win season for the first time in 31 years. Things had changed.

What lifted Clemson past LSU was a pair of Chandler Catanzaro field goals, including a 37-yarder as time expired to win it, 25-24. The signature plays of the final quarter were a 12-yard touchdown catch by wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins from quarterback Tajh Boyd with 2:46 remaining, and later a 26-yard catch to Hopkins on 4th and 16 at the Clemson 14 with 1:16 left in the game.

Clemson finished the season ranked No. 9 in the Coaches Poll and No. 11 in the AP Poll. We didn’t know it then, but Clemson knew they had arrived. Though players like Boyd and Hopkins never won a national title, their play helped set the tone for guys who would come after them like Deshaun Watson, Christian Wilkins, Hunter Renfrow, Trevor Lawrence and others to reap the benefits of what they had sewn.

“You can’t win 12 until you win 11,” Swinney said after the game. “You can’t win a national championship until you learn how to win games like this.”

“This is a landmark win.”

Needless to say, they learned how to win games like that.

Clemsoning officially died that night and the Clemson dynasty was born.

Outside of the 2014 season, Clemson has won at least 11 games since, and the Tigers still won 10 that year. Every season since 2015, Clemson has won the ACC Championship with no more than one regular-season loss. In fact, they’ve made the College Football Playoff every year since 2015 and have an overall record of 89-4, with two of those in the postseason to eventual national champion, Alabama.

Fate would have it that on the other sidelines, things would begin to take a downturn in Baton Rouge. After getting shut out in the national championship the year prior, LSU would not be the same program under Miles. Though the Tigers won 10 games again in 2013, Miles has never won that many games in a year since. He was fired mid-season by LSU in 2016 and is now at Kansas.

Of course, LSU eventually got right under Ed Orgeron. Three years later, he has his team waiting to fight Clemson for the Eye of the Tiger and the right to having the superior Death Valley.

It’s so strange to think Clemson had only won 11 games three times before that, twice in a four-year span under Ford. Flash forward seven years later and Clemson has outlasted the other concurrent dynasty in the sport in Alabama. Swinney understood the magnitude of that moment seven years ago. A sleeping giant woke up from its 30-year slumber in South Carolina that night.

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