Why unranked Clemson will remain ‘irrelevant’ this college football season
Yahoo Sports Daily hosts Caroline Fenton and Jason Fitz react to the college football preseason AP poll and discuss why unranked Clemson will remain an afterthought this college football season. Watch the full episode of Yahoo Sports Daily on YouTube or YahooSports.TV .
Video Transcript
Not only are we reacting to what we do see, but I'm gonna react to what we do not see.
And what we do not see is a team that has been there, not just in a preseason top 25, but in the preseason top 10, the preseason top five over the last decade or so, and that's Clemson.
Now, Clemson was in the coaches poll at 23, and I thought that was ridiculous, because I thought, based on what?
Christopher Vazzina, their quarterback, has basically, you know, zero time on task and has played very little college football in his three years at Clemson.
Clemson lost so much defensive talent to the NFL draft this past season.
Dabo even said it himself.
He said, "We're a bunch of nobodies," which obviously is a bunch of bulletin board material.
He doesn't have to manufacture it.
It actually is there.
Clemson has all of a sudden become an afterthought, and who would have thought when Clemson was winning national championships and getting to even more, when Clemson was the king of college football or one of the kings of college football for so long, that we would be in a position now where Clemson doesn't even crack the preseason top 25?
Clemson and Dabo, at least in the media's eyes, in the preseason poll, has become irrelevant.
I've said often on this show and in my life covering sports that we love to use the words great and suck.
We love to turn around and say, "Your team sucks."
There is an insult that is far more hurtful to a fan base than your team sucks, and there's an area that's tougher to come back from, from, than suck, and that's irrelevant.
I think you're right.
The fact that Dabo and Clemson are unranked shows us that in the modern landscape, the right now, not the what you did for us five years ago, not what you've meant for the last generation, not the championships that you have, not the resume you've accomplished.
For the right now, Clemson is worse than sucks.
Clemson's irrelevant, and I'm not sure once you hit that portion of college football, how you easily come back from it.
So it'll be, it, it'll be interesting to see for Dabo, who's been reluctant to change who he is and how he coaches in the modern landscape, if that actually helps them in any way, shape, or form become something more than they are right now, because Clemson looks like they're gonna be an afterthought in this year's college football season.
