The Pickens County Spelling Bee champs have seen better days.
It’s not all bad, of course. They’re coming off an ACC title, which pairs nicely with the fans’ 200th straight county spelling bee title. (Somehow they get the same winning word every year. It’s honestly kinda impressive. One day they’ll throw that extra P in though. I’m sure of it.)
But this is now the third straight year that they’ve lost their first game. If this had been Texas A&M, it would qualify as a tradition at this point. The only
time they’ve opened the season with a win in the past five years was when when the stoppable force that was Clemson QB D.J. Uiagalelei somehow ran up 41 points because he was given a chance to take on the movable object that was a Geoff Collins defense in a lame duck year.
It gets worse. There aren’t many coaching matchups where Dabo Swinney ends up being the more sympathetic figure, or at least the less annoying of the two options. But he got to experience that rare sentiment in Clemson’s opener… right up until his team scored only 10 points and lost to a team run by Brian Kelly.
There aren’t many true rules in the apocalyptic nightmare furnace that is modern college football. But one of them holds with very few exceptions: if you make Brian Kelly lose a game, you get to be a national hero for a day.
It almost got far funnier from there. Six quarters into the season for this Clemson team that had been hyped to return to their former heights… they had scored 13 points and were staring at a 16-3 halftime deficit in a home game against Troy.
Dabo’s team figured it out from there and won the game, of course. The most likely case is that they’ll be perfectly fine from here, because the modern ACC is just all of us beating each other up to the tune of 4-4 records while Clemson casually ignores the annual league memo and Miami ignores it while trying not to vomit all over themselves (and definitely not because Miami fans can’t read).
And hey, if that Clemson defense actually plays up to its potential, it might let them ignore that Cade Klubnik will never even amount to being the best quarterback in the state of South Carolina—not while the guy taking snaps in Columbia is still present.
Their fans will probably be happy regardless of the on-field product either way, just as long as they get to keep proving why they’re the county spelling bee champs. And that’s one honor they’ll never have to give up.
