When it comes to the trajectory of the rest of Clemson’s season, there are still multiple possibilities.
The Tigers know they have at least four games remaining. After hosting Miami this week, there’s the annual Palmetto Bowl with rival South Carolina to finish up the regular season before a date with North Carolina in the ACC championship game in early December.
Then will come a bowl game that may or may not be part of the College Football Playoff. Clemson moved up one spot to ninth in the latest CFP rankings released Tuesday, leaving the Tigers needing plenty of help when it comes to trying to crack the top 4 again. But head coach Dabo Swinney this week used his team’s slip-up against an unranked Pitt team in 2016 before winning it all that season as evidence that anything is possible in this whacky sport.
That includes a dull finish if the Tigers don’t care of business over the next few weeks starting with the Hurricanes on Saturday at Memorial Stadium.
“It’s all about the finish,” Swinney said. “That’s what everybody remembers. That’s what they say. They remember November. It’s all about how you finish. You go lose these next two games, everybody forgets you were 9-1 quick.”
Clemson started the home stretch with a bounceback performance against Louisville last week, a win in which the Tigers used a strong ground game and an opportunistic defense to overcome three more turnovers by the offense. A win Saturday would give the Tigers their 12th straight 10-win season.
More importantly to Swinney, Clemson needs to start playing its best football of the season in order to give itself the best chance to achieve all of its goals.
Swinney, whose team crashed from the ranks of the unbeaten earlier this month at Notre Dame, referenced other teams that have answered the ball after being hit with their own doses of adversity. Tennessee rebounded from its loss at Georgia two weeks ago with a throttling of Missouri and still sits at No. 5 in the CFP rankings. LSU looked lackluster in an opening loss to Florida State and was throttled at home by the Volunteers but has since won four straight games, including one over Alabama that’s helped the Tigers clinch a spot in the SEC championship game.
Clemson’s lone loss wasn’t pretty either. Notre Dame led that game 28-0 a couple of weeks ago before finishing off a 35-14 win that snapped the Tigers’ 14-game winning streak dating back to last season. Swinney is hoping the Tigers can make people forget about that the rest of the way, but that’s ultimately up to Clemson to execute with more precision and be sharper overall in its play.
“We’ve got some teams in the playoff right now that lost early bad and now all anybody talks about is how they’re doing right now, so you’ve got to finish,” Swinney said. “That’s the mentality. That’s a mindset. You want to be at your best this time of year. It’s hard to do that. Most teams grow weary, but the great ones grow stronger. We just want to grow stronger, we want to get hot, play our best football and put it all together.”
Clemson has a knack for doing just that under its 15th-year coach. The Tigers are 44-12 in November during Swinney’s tenure, including a 25-3 mark since the 2015 season. Clemson has had four undefeated final months of the regular season in the last seven years.
“We’ve got a lot of lessons that we’ve learned,” Swinney said of this season. “We’ve got a lot of information, but information without application gets no transformation. So we want to be a team that shows up and plays our best football here in the fourth quarter. We’ve been a great fourth-quarter team for years and years around here.
“It’s the same mentality. Let’s finish. Let’s put the season way.”
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