FERNANDINA BEACH, Fla. – Dan Radakovich will soon return to a place he’s familiar with. Even when it comes to his new point of entry at Clemson’s Memorial Stadium.
“I know where the visiting team buses park,” Radakovich told The Clemson Insider this week during the ACC’s spring meetings at Amelia Island. “I’m going to try to go into that tunnel and make my way upstairs as quickly as I can.”
Radakovich is the director of athletics at the University of Miami. He’s been on the job less than six months after spending nine years in the same position at Clemson, but, for the first time since leaving Clemson in December, Radakovich will return to Clemson when the Tigers host Miami in football in late November.
“(I will) certainly say hello to a lot of great people that I’ve had the pleasure to work with over nine years,” Radakovich said.
Radakovich spent much of that time watching Clemson morph into a dominant program in the ACC. The Tigers won six straight ACC championships and made six consecutive College Football Playoff appearances from 2015-2020. They won two of the program’s three national championships during that time (2016 and 2018 seasons).
Clemson pulled off its 11th straight 10-win season last fall, a level of consistency for which Radakovich said Miami’s football program is striving. The Hurricanes, who are entering a new era under first-year coach Mario Cristobal, haven’t won more than eight games since 2017, the last time Miami played in the ACC championship game.
“Miami football right now is not at that level from a talent perspective and certainly a number of perspectives, but we aspire to that,” Radakovich said. “It’s wonderful that Clemson is that bellwether for everyone in the league to look at (and say) we need to get like that. And I think, inside that room, there’s a lot of athletic directors who’ve said that and continue to say that.”
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