Broken Coverage for Week 4: On Curses and Comebacks
Follow college football long enough, and you know that the Saturdays that appear somewhat lackluster going into the weekend deliver some of the season’s best action.
Thus, that Week 4 followed this theme shouldn’t necessarily be a surprise. But the possible implications of some of the weekend’s most noteworthy games may be indicative of more than your typical, better-than-it-should-be slate.
NC State’s overtime win over Clemson provides a fitting and obvious jumping-off point. Before diving into significant of the Pack’s two-overtime win, however, we should first revisit a term from the college football lexicon that long ago fell out of use: “Clemsoning.”
For those who are either unfamiliar or who simply forgot, Clemsoning refers to the Tigers’ long-held reputation of losing big games in especially heartbreaking fashion.
I don’t know and have not been able to find who coined the term or when, but can say that it largely began to disappear from the collective vocabulary in 2015 during a Dabo Swinney tirade about the word.
The Tigers running the table that regular season and making the College Football Playoff Championship Game reinforced Swinney’s point. And while some might label Clemson’s loss to Alabama in that year’s title round “Clemsoning,” I view it as erroneous. That was simply an excellent game between what were clearly the two best teams in the nation and one side happened to make more plays than the other.
But any lingering sentiment about the power of Clemsoning that may have remained after 2015 was emphatically put to bed the next year when the Tigers gained revenge of the Crimson Tide in another instant classic.
I bring up Clemsoning not to suggest Saturday’s loss at NC State marked the word’s return, but rather to provide some necessary context.
Since that 2015 season, Clemson has had a stranglehold on one of the four berths in the College Football Playoff mostly because the program has had some really damn good players and coaching, but also due to the collective weakness of the ACC.
Winning one of the Power Five conferences with one loss has been a guarantee for making the Playoff, save the Baylor/TCU/Ohio State kerfuffle of the inaugural season. And Clemson’s never been in real danger of losing twice in a regular season.
To Clemson’s credit, it hasn’t ducked tough non-conference competition during its reign of dominance and the Tigers handled business against quality opponents Notre Dame (2015), Auburn (2016 and 2017). It’s not Clemson’s fault that out-of-conference rival South Carolina has struggled since 2014, just like it isn’t the Tigers’ fault the ACC has lacked the collective strength to challenge their dominance.
Opening the season with a loss to Georgia put Clemson behind the eight ball on two fronts: It marked the program’s first regular-season non-conference loss since 2014, which coincidentally was also against Georgia; and no team has ever reached the Playoff after losing in Week 1. The earliest loss endured by one of the final four was Ohio State’s Week 2 defeat to Virginia Tech in 2014.
Bringing this all full circle is that the team to hand Clemson its second loss is one of those that became synonymous with the ethos once known as Clemsoning.
NC State has been consistent in Dave Doeren’s under-appreciated tenure as head coach, winning eight or nine games in three of the last four seasons. Part of the Wolf Pack’s consistency, though, has been their inability to take the step from good to great.
A series of gut-punch losses to Clemson fortified that glass ceiling.
Saturday’s matchup could have, perhaps even should have been more of the same. Two missed field goals in the final two possessions of regulation? Had it been scripted to set up a Clemson win, the writing would have rightly chastised as hackneyed.
But it only made the drama of NC State’s win in the second overtime all the more enthralling.
While Dabo buried the concept of Clemsoning in a rant that’s quintessential Dabo energy, Doeren’s postgame press conference Saturday was the polar opposite. He could be best described as relieved, even chuckling slightly as he acknowledged the existence of a curse.
Should the breaking of curses become a trend for the remainder of the season, we’re in for a special autumn.
BRUWINNING
Another of those cosmic college football forces that exists in the same vein as Clemsoning once did: Bruining.
Since a December Saturday in Coral Gables 23 years ago, UCLA has had a habit of dropping confounding or gut-wrenching decisions that cost the Bruins dearly. Some examples of Bruining:
- In 2005, UCLA went into November 8-0, ranked No. 5, and facing a favorable final stretch before a potential Game of the Century Redux against USC. Even with a loss to the Trojans, the Bruins would have been a shoo-in for a BCS bowl — were it not for a 52-14 loss against a two-win Arizona team.
- The Bruins led going into the fourth quarter of the Pac-12 Championship Game in Jim Mora’s first season, 2012. A win over Stanford would have sent UCLA into a the Rose Bowl against a middling Wisconsin. After surrendering 10 fourth-quarter points, the typically automatic Ka'imi Fairbairn missed a 51-yard field-goal attempt in the Bay Area rain.
- UCLA controlled its destiny for a third straight Pac-12 Championship Game appearance in 2013 when Arizona State came to Pasadena for an ostensible divisional title matchup. The Bruins regained possession down 38-33 with a chance to win and drove into Sun Devils territory before committing back-to-back penalties. UCLA faced a fourth-and-35 before turning the ball over on downs.
- On Black Friday 2014, UCLA was riding a five-game winning streak and needed only to beat a struggling Stanford team to reach the Pac-12 Championship. The Cardinal blasted the Bruins in a 31-10 final that wasn’t as close as the final score.
- Heading into the latter half of November again in control of its conference-title fate, UCLA rallied from down eight points in the second half at home vs. Washington State. With a 27-24 lead, the Bruins allowed a 75-yard drive capped on a Cougars touchdown with three seconds remaining.
Last week’s loss to Fresno State doesn’t qualify as Bruining, despite the heartbreaking nature of taking a lead in the final minute after a raucous comeback…
…only to give it up seconds later.
However, I don’t view the loss as a case of Bruining. It could have been had it derailed UCLA for Pac-12 play. But the Bruins’ response Saturday in Stanford suggest that maybe this year, things will be different.
Stanford rallied from a 21-7 deficit in the second half to force a 21-21 tie. Rather than crumple, UCLA seemed to have learned from the previous week and shut down the Cardinal down the stretch. That Stanford’s been at the center of so many of the Bruins’ low points in the past decade make Saturday’s Pac-12-opening win especially meaningful.
Zach Charbonnet, who was slowed to just 19 yards after averaging more than 11 in the wins over Hawai’i and LSU, returned to form with 209 at Stanford.
October more than November will determine if UCLA is destined to Bruining or Bruwinning with games against Washington, Oregon and Utah. As reactionary as it might be to write of a game played on Oct. 2, however, UCLA-Arizona State next week at the Rose Bowl feels like a de facto South division championship with as bad as the rest of the division has played through the season’s first month.
IT AIN’T INTRAMURALS
The same way a handful of excruciating losses can define how a program is perceived, one unfortunate soundbite can become synonymous with a coach.
Consider Dan Hawkins. When you read the name, is the first thing that comes to mind his role in transforming Boise State to a national powerhouse? Or…do you think of his rant during his ill-fated Colorado tenure that became a meme?
The time to start of thinking of Dan Hawkins as the coach responsible for building a title contender at UC Davis might be near.
The Aggies scored the first FCS-over-FBS upset of the 2021 season when, on opening night, they knocked off Tulsa. UC Davis has won its last three since, including a 17-14 slugfest at preseason Big Sky Conference favorite Weber State in Week 4.
It’s Division I football! And UC Davis is excelling at it.
THE NO-PUNT REPORT
UC Davis’ start and Dan Hawkins’ retaking control of the narrative around his career is one of many, many terrific stories in the FCS this season. Just today, Richmond gave Virginia Tech all it could handle in Lane Stadium with a quarterback, Beau English, who leveraged the additional eligibility of the pandemic season to attend law school while playing football.
OK, so plugging my own work aside, the interesting stories around FCS are plentiful. And College Gameday opts to cover Presbyterian. Sigh.
I swear I wasn’t planning on including a PC passage in this week’s edition, but ESPN forced my hand.
If the point in hiring Kevin Kelley was to garner national attention, well, it’s working. The Dan LeBatard Show, The Athletic and now Gameday have all bought into the gimmick hook, line and sinker. But what happens when the novelty wears off?
Longtime wrestling personality Jim Cornette once invoked a colorful euphemism about the writing of reviled booker Vince Russo, whose philosophy was to showcase as much shocking and peculiar content as possible to garner eyeballs.
Cornette’s description of the tactic is too vulgar to repeat in this newsletter, but it involves dogs in heat and the novelty of seeing such a thing as it wears off.
Presbyterian has now played two games against Div. I competition under Kelley. It lost the first to Campbell under coach Mike Minter — a program and coach whose stories are among those in FCS more worthy of attention than PC — 72-0.
Today, Presbyterian gave up 56 unanswered points to Dayton after building an improbable 23-0 lead in the first quarter. The Flyers won, 63-43, but the game wasn’t that close.
Presbyterian is on a bye next week, so mercifully, you won’t see anything in this space about the Blue Hose. But hey — I’m talking the program just like those lavishing undue praise on it, so who’s really the mark?
In the meantime, I defer all Presbyterian coverage to my friend Rovitz at HotSprotsTakes.com, who is using NCAA Football ‘07 to take a far more critical look at Kelley’s style than Gameday did in its Week 4 feature.
THE LETTER OF THE LAW vs. THE SPIRIT OF THE LAW
In a weekend filled with thrilling comebacks, Old Dominion nearly completed the most remarkable — emphasis on nearly.
The Monarchs trailed Buffalo 35-7 at halftime, but whittled away with stops-and-scores throughout the second half. Old Dominion scored its final touchdown with 19 seconds remaining when D.J. Mack Jr. found Zack Kuntz for a score that, with the PAT, would have sent it to overtime.
However, Old Dominion’s PAT went from routine chip shot to a more challenging distance when the below was flagged as an unsportsmanlike conduct for excessive celebration.
So…this is technically a penalty. But until we have actual robots officiating games, I would appreciate referees exhibit some human judgement when deciding when to throw a potentially game-altering flag.
There are instances in which a celebration flag in the final moments is warranted.
Old Dominion’s celebration wasn’t that. Context should matter, and a back-up congratulating his teammates for bridging a four-touchdown gap warrants the flag staying in the pocket.
A WEEKEND FOR COMEBACKS
As alluded to above, Week 4 featured a number of noteworthy comebacks:
- Appalachian State kicked off the weekend with a 10-0 fourth quarter to beat Marshall, 31-30.
- Fresno State followed up a defining win (itself a late-game rally, as noted) last week by playing its way out of a trap situation against UNLV. The Bulldogs trailed by two touchdowns on two separate occasions before taking the lead for good in the late fourth quarter.
- Central Michigan scored 21 points in the fourth quarter to rally from a 17-point deficit and beat FIU.
- One that fell short but warrants a shout, Elon trailed William & Mary 21-0 early but ultimately made it a 34-31 game.
