What's Clemson's 2020 Schedule Going to Look Like?
The ACC is the only Power 5 conference that’s yet to release its football teams' schedules for the upcoming season.
The long wait is just about over.
The league is set to announce the entire 2020 slate Wednesday on “Packer and Durham” show at 9 a.m. on ACC Network.
While the 5-time reigning conference champ Clemson has known which ACC schools it will play and where for some time, Wednesday it’ll know when.
Here’s a look at who and where:
The home conference games are against Louisville, N.C. State, Syracuse and Virginia.
The road conference games are at Boston College, Florida State, Wake Forest and Georgia Tech.
The Tigers non-conference slate looks like this: Akron (Sept. 19), at Notre Dame (Nov. 7), The Citadel (Nov. 14) and South Carolina (Nov. 28).
There will only be one off week in 2020, and the ACC championship game is scheduled for Dec. 5 at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, N.C.
Here are five questions about Clemson's 2020’s full schedule to ponder:
Who will Clemson play the first two weeks?
With the out-of-conference games already scheduled with a date, it means the Tigers will play two ACC opponents the first two weeks of the season.
What it’ll look like can be deduced from the rest of the ACC non-conference slates.
Syracuse, N.C. State, Louisville and Georgia Tech are the only ACC teams on Clemson’s schedule that don’t have a Week 1 game already scheduled.
The Cardinals are the only team that doesn’t have a Week 2 contest set.
Maybe the likeliest scenario is that the Tigers start the season against Georgia Tech in Atlanta and then host Louisville the following week.
One thing to note, Clemson is scheduled to play Georgia Tech at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, home of the Atlanta Falcons, in 2022. This year, Tech is hosting Notre Dame there.
Will Clemson play a non-Saturday game?
The Tigers didn’t play a Thursday or Friday game in 2018. That’s the only season since 2011 that Clemson didn’t play one of those weekday contests.
Last season, the Tigers were the debut football game of the ACC Network when they hosted Georgia Tech at home. Could there be a return game on the first Thursday of the year? It makes sense that the Tigers open the season Sept. 3 at Bobby Dodd Stadium.
Clemson could also play a Friday game at Boston College. It’s unlikely they’ll play on a Thursday during the NFL season. ESPN has gone away from putting up marquee teams against the pros in recent years.
When will the week off fall?
Dabo Swinney generally likes to have the bye some time around the midpoint of the season. October is a good time to catch your breath and evaluate the team before starting what he calls the “Championship Phase” in November.
It would make sense that the off week could fall Nov. 1, the week before Clemson heads up to Notre Dame. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that the bye could be Week 2, but you have to think Clemson coaches and administrators would fight against that. Eleven consecutive weeks of football is hard on anybody.
The same goes for the spot between the final two home games in late November.
The week after the Notre Dame trip is another realistic possibility.
Who will Clemson play before and after the trip to Notre Dame?
Let’s face it: There isn’t another marquee name on the schedule this year. No SEC team is showing up in Week 2. The series with Oklahoma is 15 years away.
The rematch from the 2018 College Football Playoff Cotton Bowl is a huge game for both teams. It matters who you play the week before and the week after. Teams sometimes get caught napping on the bookends of a game of this magnitude.
You could see N.C. State pop up in one of those spots, but if there isn’t a bye week, Clemson could be facing back-to-back road games to somewhere like Boston College or Florida State.
Which conference team will land in the week between The Citadel and rival South Carolina?
As noted above, it’s hard to see this being a bye week on a year without multiple weeks off. Scheduling an FCS team is a practice long used by the SEC and even Clemson in past years before the big rivalry week. That won’t happen with The Citadel coming to Memorial Stadium the week before.
Wake Forest is a team Clemson’s played late in the season before. Maybe that’s a good time for Virginia; the Tigers bookend conference play with Coastal Division foes.
One option could be wrapping things up with the Florida State game in Tallahassee, Fla. If the Seminoles are competitive again under new coach Mike Norvell, it would be a good showcase for the league during a week in which many of the top teams in the country will either be off or playing a guarantee game.
