A national analyst took a look at where the most impactful results will come from during the 2025 college football campaign.
Fox Sports’ lead college football analyst, Joel Klatt, broke down 10 games that he thinks will shape the upcoming season – including Clemson vs. LSU.
Of course, the two teams will open the season in the national spotlight when they face off for a marquee tilt at Memorial Stadium on Saturday, Aug. 30 (7:30 p.m., ABC).
“Sign me up… I love this matchup as well,” Klatt said. “Easily going to be a top-10 matchup in Week 1.”
After four previous postseason meetings, this year will mark the first meeting between Clemson and LSU in regular season play.
LSU is 0-3 in season openers under head coach Brian Kelly, who took over the program in 2022. After losing 24-23 to Florida State in New Orleans to open the 2022 season, LSU lost to the Seminoles again in 2023, by a score of 45-24 in Orlando, before falling to Southern Cal, 27-20, in last year’s opener in Las Vegas.
Klatt believes Kelly “needs” to come away with a win against Clemson.
“Brian Kelly needs this game. He needs this game,” Klatt said. “Now, we all expect LSU to be a really good football team. They’ve gone all in out of the portal. They’ve got a quarterback [Garrett Nussmeier] back. That experience at that position, as we’ve seen in the last couple of years with [Michigan’s] J.J. McCarthy and [Ohio State’s] Will Howard winning national championships, you need experience at that position. And now Brian Kelly has it, although he’s 0-3 in season openers, and LSU, they need this. Like, let’s be honest. I think LSU fans need this. They need to see this program progressing.
“In a lot of ways, it’s not all that dissimilar from Sark’s [Steve Sarkisian’s] first couple of years at Texas, where it was like, ‘Is this working?’ And then you got the breakthrough, and so we need to start seeing the breakthrough for Brian Kelly at LSU. I think that’s totally fair, and I do think we’re going to see that this year. I’m a big believer in what LSU can do this year. I think this is a playoff team, and yet they’re going to Clemson, and I actually feel a little bit better about Clemson.”
Clemson is 12-5 against SEC opponents in regular season play in the College Football Playoff era. This year will be Clemson’s first time opening a season at home since 2019, as the Tigers opened all five seasons from 2020-24 either on the road or at a neutral site. Clemson is 2-3 in those games, with neutral site losses to Georgia in 2021 (10-3) and 2024 (34-3), a 28-7 loss at Duke in 2023, a neutral site 41-10 win over Georgia Tech in 2022, and a 37-13 win at Wake Forest in 2020.
Klatt is very high on Clemson ahead of the 2025 season. He released his post-spring Top 25 last month and put Dabo Swinney’s team at No. 5 on the list, while Klatt recently ranked Cade Klubnik as the No. 1 quarterback in college football entering the upcoming season.
“Dabo is clearly – he’s bet on himself, his philosophy. He’s bet on his model, and now, he seems to be reloading for another run,” Klatt said. “Clemson is really good. They’ve also got experience at the quarterback position with the guy that I had as my No. 1 quarterback going into the season, Cade Klubnik.
“I think you look at this matchup, you’ve got a really good defense for Clemson. You’ve got a quality offense for LSU. You’re going to have the home game effect for Clemson, and then you get into the conference kind of aspect of this matchup, which I love.”
Klatt went on to detail why the Clemson-LSU matchup could set the trajectories for the respective programs and impact the College Football Playoff conversations later in the season:
“In this respect, when you get this SEC-ACC battle early in the year, in particular with a team that I think we all, including myself, expect Clemson to win the ACC – if LSU beats Clemson in Clemson Week 1, and Clemson goes on to win the ACC – let’s say even in a dominant fashion – well now the SEC’s going to be sitting there like, ‘Hey, that conference should only get one participant, obviously, and we should get all the rest of them.’ That’s why these non-conference games become so important, is because of the lobbying that will inevitably take place as we finish up the season…
“Right now, the SEC desperately needs a giant non-conference win… [Clemson was] 0-3 against the SEC last year, so they need a win against that conference. But the SEC also needs a marquee win against anybody else, and this is clearly, at least in my estimation, going to be a top-five or -six team in the preseason in Clemson, so this would be a big one for the SEC. Because what we saw late last year is that they’re starting to lose their grip on this mantra that everyone can just pound the table and say, ‘Oh, they’re the best conference.’ Well, that didn’t actually play out the last couple of years, at least not on the field. Not in terms of the national champion, and not in some of these marquee games, and in particular playoff games when everything was on the line. So, implications in that respect, in terms of conference supremacy and in particular the playoff moving forward.”
Clemson is currently a 2.5-point favorite for the game against LSU, according to FanDuel Sportsbook.
You can see Klatt’s full list of the 10 games that will shape the 2025 season, and hear his commentary on each of those contests in the video below:
Week 1 — Texas vs. Ohio State
Week 1 — LSU vs. Clemson
Week 2 — Michigan vs. Oklahoma
Week 3 — Texas A&M vs. Notre Dame
Week 5 — Oregon vs. Penn State
Week 5 — USC vs. Illinois
Week 5 — Alabama vs. Georgia
Week 10 — Penn State vs. Ohio State
Week 11 — LSU vs. Alabama
Week 14 — Ohio State vs. Michigan