Clemson senior quarterback Christopher Vizzina made his second career start, and first career road start, on Saturday night against No. 11 LSU in Baton Rouge, La.

Following Clemson’s 51-10 loss, head coach Dabo Swinney was directly asked if Vizzina will start next Saturday vs. Georgia Southern in the Tigers’ 2026 home opener.

“I don’t know,” Swinney said. “Again, we gotta watch the tape and evaluate, then we’ll go from there.”

Leading up to the LSU game, Swinney officially named Vizzina the Week 1 starter, though Swinney made it clear that true freshman Tait Reynolds would “likely” see snaps under center in Baton Rouge, though Swinney stopped short of guaranteeing that Reynolds will play against LSU. Swinney also said that Vizzina did not have a “lifetime contract” on the starting job after narrowly beating out Reynolds in fall camp.

Vizzina played most of the first half against LSU before being replaced by Reynolds on the final possession of the first half. Reynolds took over from there before Vizzina later re-entered the game in the fourth quarter with Clemson trailing 44-3 at the time.

Following the game, Swinney was asked how he is approaching the QB position moving forward and if he would say Vizzina and Reynolds are on equal footing at this point going into next week.
“That’s what I said coming into it. That’s why I said we didn’t want to guarantee that [Tait] was going to play, but it was pretty likely he was going to play,” Swinney said. “So, we needed to go play games. Again, I wish we had a game or two where you gotta go work the kinks out, but that’s not the stick we drew. So, we’ve got some stuff on tape now. We’ve got some things in real live games that we can evaluate, and then we’ll go from there.

“So, I would say we’ll continue to keep moving forward. I think there will be more to come on that as we go play another game or two.”

For the game, Vizzina went 10-of-16 passing for 83 yards and threw a pick-six late in the first quarter, resulting in a 17-3 lead for LSU. In the first half, he went 6-of-11 passing for 51 yards.

Reynolds attempted six passes on the night and completed four of them for 22 yards.

Swinney gave his initial assessment of the quarterback play Saturday.

“We’ll study the film,” he said. “The pick-six hurt. I mean, that hurt. I think it was a drop end that dropped into [coverage], and he didn’t see him. So, good play by them. That was a killer.

“CV made some nice throws, and Tait came in there – it was good to be able to get him in there, let him play and let him get hit a little bit. Wish it had been different circumstances. But both of those guys, we’ll evaluate them and we’ll keep moving forward.”