On the Packer and Durham show on ACC Network this past week, Mark Packer and ESPN analyst Tom Luginbill, who was filling in for Wes Durham to co-host the show with Packer, discussed the topic of what the most dominant season in Clemson football history is.
Packer and Luginbill agreed that it’s unquestionably the 2018 season during which the Tigers ran the table and finished the season with a perfect 15-0 record to become the first major college football team in the modern era to go 15-0.
That Tiger squad, of course, capped the 2018 campaign by throttling Alabama, 44-16, to win the College Football Playoff National Championship on Jan. 7, 2019, at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif.
Trevor Lawrence went 20 of 32 passing for 347 yards and three touchdowns in that contest, which really wasn’t a contest considering the outcome. Justyn Ross racked up 153 yards and a touchdown on six catches, while Travis Etienne also added a couple of scores on the ground and tallied 86 yards on 14 carries.
Clemson’s defense held Alabama’s offense, which had averaged nearly 48 points per game coming in, to just 16 first-half points.
Here’s what Packer and Luginbill had to say about that game against Alabama and the most dominant season in Clemson football history:
Packer: “You have to just go back a couple years, right — 2018, 15-0, going to play Alabama. I still remember all the SEC talking heads that are still upset to this day. ‘Oh, Alabama’s going to beat them sideways, Trevor Lawrence has never seen a defense like this.’ OK, that’s cute. How about them taking a knee to make sure they didn’t put a half a hundred on Nick Saban that night. That was an absolute butt kicking. What a great team.”
Luginbill: “You could make an argument that team is comparable, I think, to the 2019 LSU team.”
Packer: “I think we had a run here — Clemson in ’18, LSU in ’19, I think Georgia’s team last year was special, Alabama the year before during the COVID year. We really had kind of a crazy run here over the last four or five years where you’ve just seen teams for the ages, right, for the ages. That LSU team in ’19, which beat, ironically, Clemson in the national championship game, what they were doing offensively — did to everyone that year — was spectacular. But it really kind of started with the ’18 Clemson team, in my opinion.”
Luginbill: “I agree. I don’t even think that’s a debate.”
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