By Will Vandervort.
Who predicted that through the first eight weeks of the season Mississippi State and Ole Miss would be ranked in the top 3 and would be in the middle of the college football playoff discussions?
College football is one of the craziest sports to follow especially when it comes to predicting where a team is going to fall during the course of the season. When the Clemson Tigers opened the 2014 season, many expected the Tigers to be right where they are after seven games – losses at No. 9 Georgia and No. 2 Florida State and wins everywhere else.
So, at 5-2, including four straight victories, are the 20th-ranked Tigers where they are supposed to be?
“No. I wanted to be 7-0,” Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney said Tuesday. “That is where I wanted to be, but I can’t do anything about that now. All I can do about it now is try to be 6-2.”
Clemson will try to get to 6-2 this Saturday in Death Valley when it host Syracuse at 7 p.m. on ESPNU.
“You can’t win seven until you win six. We are just trying to be the best that we can be. That is our goal every year is to be the best that we can be,” Swinney said. “We certainly have competed our tails off. I am really proud of that. I am proud of the fact that our guys have competed each and every week with great effort.
“Our guys have shown up and they have played. We have found a way to lose a couple of ball games and now it seems like we are finding ways to win some of those games.”
Clemson (4-1 ACC) has found ways to beat Louisville (23-17) and Boston College (17-13) when in the final minutes of each game the outcomes seemed in doubt. The Tigers stopped Louisville at the one-yard line with 21 seconds left on the clock, while they needed a dropped pass from running back Tyler Rouse inside the five-yard line with 1:07 left in the game to beat BC.
“As a competitor, these close games have been very thrilling,” Clemson defensive tackle Grady Jarrett said. “You have to go out there and get that stop to win the game. It has been fun because we have come out on top, but that can easily be flipped the other way and we don’t want to let it get to that point every single week, but these kinds of games are definitely what you play the games for.”
And they are the kinds of games that make college football so much fun. It’s games like the Louisville and Boston College games that make it so unpredictable.
“Mississippi State was not even ranked at the start of the year so that just goes to show you how much everybody knows. They are No. 1 in the country right now,” Swinney said. “But, where will they be in five weeks? They might be out of the top 25. Who knows? That is why it is so much fun to be a part of college football.
“It is very, very hard to maintain consistency in your performance.”
But that’s what Swinney’s Tigers are trying to do and in a college football world where so many things have occurred, he believes his team has a good chance to not just be good, but to be great.
“We could be a great team by the end of the year if we can stay on track and continue to develop,” he said. “We got to get a few guys back and things like that. It is a fun bunch to coach. It is good to see a good group of guys respond.
“With the difficult start we had and the difficult way that we lost against Florida State in overtime in a game that we really dominated and to find a way to lose the game. To see how the guys have responded to that has been impressive. I have been really proud of them. We have won four in a row now. We have had to grind it out. We will see where we are at the end of the year, but I would have hoped that we would have been 7-0 right now.”
But they are exactly where they were predicted to be.