Clemson Tigers Look to Make More History

The Clemson Tigers enter their fifth consecutive College Football Playoff in search of the program’s fourth national championship and with hopes of becoming the first repeat national champion in the CFP era.

The Tigers would become the first back-to-back champion since Alabama’s consecutive titles in BCS National Championship Games in 2011-12. The title would be Clemson’s third in four years, which would place the Tigers with the 2009-12 Alabama Crimson Tide and 1994-97 Nebraska Cornhuskers as the only FBS programs in the AP poll era to accomplish the feat.

Clemson entered the season as the nation’s No. 1 team in both polls for the first time in school history, a perch it held until the final week of September. Clemson would eventually drop as low as No. 4 in the AP Poll and No. 5 in the CFP listing before climbing back to No. 3, where it sits today in both major polls and in College Football Playoff seeding. The Tigers became the first team since Alabama in 1966 to enter the year as the AP No. 1 and finish the regular season third or lower despite not losing a game.

Clemson bulldozed its way through the majority of its 2019 campaign, posting a 13-0 record for only the third time in school history (2015, 2018 and 2019). Clemson has outscored its opponents, 605-138, an average margin of 35.9 points per game, outpacing the school record of 35.3 established by Coach John Heisman’s squad in Clemson’s fifth year of football in 1900.

Along the way, Clemson has collected a national-best 11 wins against Power Five opponents, and even with the inclusion of a one-point conference road win in September, Clemson won those 11 games against Power Five opponents by an average of 34.5 points. Head Coach Dabo Swinney entered the year confident in his football team but curious about the chemistry that would develop between a small but strong group of senior leaders and a young but talented group behind them that included 80 freshmen and sophomores.

The chemistry exceeded his wildest expectations, as he told reporters “it came together beautifully” and labeled his team simply as “super fun.” Swinney’s senior class sits at 54-3 for their careers, one win away from tying the FBS record for senior class wins and two wins away from passing the 2018 Clemson and Alabama seniors to hold the record outright.

Two more wins would also give the Clemson seniors and the Clemson program 30 consecutive wins, which would break Florida State’s ACC record of 29 (2012- 14) and represent only the 12th winning streak of 30 or more games in FBS history