With Clemson’s matchup with Tennessee in the 2022 Orange Bowl right around the corner, head coach Dabo Swinney spoke with the media on Thursday alongside Tennessee head coach Josh Heupel and took a trip down memory lane to his first Orange Bowl as the Tigers’ head coach back in 2012.
Following a 10-3 regular season in 2011 and an ACC Championship win over Virginia Tech, 14th-ranked Clemson was selected to play in the program’s first Orange Bowl since 1982 against No. 23 West Virginia, but the game’s outcome was not quite what Swinney, or the Tigers had hoped for.
Despite an early lead in the first quarter, the Tigers began to show signs of what was to come with what would have been a touchdown ball taken out of the hands of Clemson running back Andre Ellington just as he was about to get the ball to the Mountaineers’ 1-yard line, as well as the plethora of offensive mistakes that followed.
That play sparked a big offensive performance for West Virginia that put them up 21-17 early in the second quarter and proved to be a deficit quarterback Tajh Boyd and the rest of Clemson’s offense could not recover from. The Tigers ultimately fell to the Mountaineers by a staggering 37 points for a final score of 70-33.
“I mean it was a pretty bad night, that’s for sure,” Swinney said when recounting the 2012 Orange Bowl. “30 years since we had been to the Orange Bowl. Again, though, that’s football. I think we’re about to go up four or five points on the 1, Andre Ellington, you get touchdown and then next thing you know the ball goes 100 yards the other way. Then I think we throw a pick-six the next series and then I think we fumble, and they go score, it was downhill from there. That’s football, but it was a great experience for us.”
For the then third-year head coach, Clemson’s disappointing showing in the 2012 Orange Bowl was just a blip on the radar, a bad moment amidst what Swinney recounts as a great season.
“It had been 30 years since we had been to the Orange Bowl, but one thing I told our team after the game was it was a bad moment, but we had a really great year,” Swinney said. “We won the league that year for the first time in 20 years, people sometimes forget that. That was a bad night and that’s what everybody wanted to focus on, but my job in that moment was to make sure we didn’t let a bad moment make us lose sight of a great year.”
And the Tigers did just that. Determined to not let it be another 30 years before Clemson made a run in the Orange Bowl, Swinney and the Tigers then went on to go on a 46-8 run over the next four seasons, leading to not only another Orange Bowl appearance in 2015, but also Clemson’s first national championship appearance since 1981.
“We were coming off of my second year and that was my third year we won the league,” Swinney said. “The year before that we won six games, so it was just another step for us, and I told them it wouldn’t be another 30 years before we got back to the Orange Bowl. We were back two years later and beat a great Ohio State team right here back in 2015. I’m thankful to have another opportunity, so third time now in 10, 11 years. It was just a bad day in the midst of a great journey of Clemson football — that’s how I look at it, just all part of it.”
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