Tag: Stanford Football

A bit of history will be made Saturday when the Stanford Cardinal visit the Clemson Tigers for the two teams’ Week 5 matchup.

For one, it will be Stanford’s first trip to Clemson. The two teams have only met once before, in the 1986 Gator Bowl in Jacksonville. Danny Ford’s Tigers defeated Jack Elway’s Stanford team that year, 27-21.

For another, Stanford’s visit will mark just the second time that a team from the West Coast will play in Death Valley. The only other program to do that was Long Beach State, Clemson’s opponent in the 1990 season opener. That same year, Tigers coach Dabo Swinney was in his sophomore season as a wide receiver at Alabama after earning a scholarship as a former walk-on player.

Saturday’s game against Stanford will mark the Tigers’ fourth matchup against a team that had belonged to the Pac-12 conference. The California Golden Bears and the USC Trojans are the only other former traditional Pac-12 members that Clemson has played.

So how does Clemson stack up against California teams historically in the small handful of times they’ve met?

Back in 1966, the Tigers met USC in a rare trip to the West Coast. Legendary coach John McKay’s Trojans shut out the Tigers, 30-0, at the L.A. Coliseum. USC finished the regular season 7-3 and won what would soon become the Pacific-8 (Pac 8) conference.

Clemson’s only other regular-season trip to California was back in 1951. Frank Howard’s team met the Pacific Tigers in Stockton in the fourth game of the season on Oct. 13. Pacific was ranked No. 20 and earned a 21-7 victory over Clemson, who would finish 7-2 in the regular season that year to earn a trip to the Gator Bowl to play the Miami Hurricanes on New Year’s Day 1952.

Some 40 years later, on New Year’s Day 1992, Clemson met the California Golden Bears in a top 15 matchup in the Citrus Bowl in Orlando. Coach Bruce Snyder’s Cal squad put a 37-13 whipping on a Clemson team that had won the ACC that season. Cal finished the year ranked No. 8 in the final AP Top 25 poll. Clemson finished No. 18. The Tigers wouldn’t win the ACC again until 2011.

As for Clemson’s only other head-to-head meeting with Stanford, the 1986 Gator Bowl was billed by CBS broadcaster Verne Lundquist as a matchup of “force vs. finesse” and “power vs. pride.” Clemson took a 27-0 lead into halftime on the strength of touchdown runs from Chris Lancaster, Rodney Williams and Ray Williams.

The Cardinal got three second-half touchdown runs from Brad Muster, who would go on to become a first-round NFL draft pick by the Chicago Bears in 1988.

This past summer, Stanford and Cal officially joined the ACC following the collapse of the Pac-12 in 2023 amid the latest wave of conference realignment, which also saw the Oregon Ducks and Washington Huskies join USC and UCLA in the Big Ten.

On Tuesday, Swinney talked about the unique circumstances of Stanford’s visit to Clemson and what he called the “newness” of college football in the wake of conference realignment.

“There’s gonna be a lot of matchups that everybody loved traditionally that you may not see as often,” Swinney said. “But there will be some new matchups like this that you’ll say, ‘OK, that’s going to be interesting.’ This is a true East Coast-West Coast matchup.”

RELATED: Swinney gives an injury update on the Clemson Tigers after NC State

Kickoff for Clemson vs. Stanford is at 7 p.m. ET Saturday in Death Valley. The game can be seen on ESPN. The Tigers climbed four spots to No. 15 in this week’s US LBM Coaches Poll after their 59-35 victory over rival NC State last Saturday.

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