The Clemson Insider went back and ranked Clemson’s 25 best teams of all-time.

What classifies a certain team as one of the best? Of course winning a championship—national or conference—will be the first qualification. The other qualifications are overall record, national ranking and where they fell in the conference standings.

We continue our rankings with the No. 10 team on our list:

The 1939 Tigers (9-1, 4-0 in SoCon, ranked No. 12)

As they sat in a parked car outside old Florence Memorial Stadium in Florence, South Carolina following a 6-0 loss to the Citadel on October 16, 1931, then Clemson head coach Jess Neely, assistant coach Joe Davis, Captain Frank Jervey and Captain Pete Heffner talked quietly about the future of its football program.

Jervey, who the Jervey Athletic Center is named for today, was working in Washington, D.C., at the time as a liaison between the military and the college, while Heffner was a member of the military staff at Clemson and had a strong interest in athletics. He also assisted with coaching in his spare time.

“What we ought to do is get the alumni to give Jess some backing by helping him finance the football team,” said Heffner in the book The Clemson Tigers from 1896 to Glory.

The Tigers were in the midst of a 1-6-2 season with the only win coming a few weeks earlier against NC State. This was the first year of what is commonly known in Clemson lore as the “Seven Lean Years.” Neely, who went go on to become one of the nation’s most successful coaches at Rice, knew he was going to need something more if Clemson was going to stay competitive on the gridiron.

In hearing Heffner’s suggestion, Jervey asked Neely how much the school should ask its alumni for. The Clemson coach responded by suggesting the idea of a $50 Club.

“If I could get $10,000 a year to build the football program, I could give Clemson fans a winning team,” Neely said.

And thus the concept of the first booster club organization in college athletics was born.

Through the help of Rupert H. Fike, the idea of $50 a year was scaled down to $10 under the slogan “I Pay Ten A Year.” On August 21, 1934, Fike informed Neely that the IPTAY Club had been organized and that a constitution was formulated.

The constitution stated the purpose of the Clemson Order of IPTAY “shall be to provide annual financial support to the athletic department at Clemson and to assist in every other way possible to regain for Clemson the high athletic standing which rightfully belongs to her.”

After three consecutive losing seasons from 1931-’33, the 1934 season slowly started a trend which saw Clemson’s fortunes on the football field turn around. That year, the Tigers beat archrival South Carolina for the first time in four years, 19-0, on their way to a 5-4 record. In 1935, Clemson improved to 6-3 under Neely and again beat the hated Gamecocks, this time 44-0.

The Tigers beat USC in 1936 and 1937, and though they did not have great years as a whole, they also did not have a losing record, setting the stage for one of the best four-year runs in Clemson history. In 1938, Clemson produced a 7-1-1 team, which included a 34-12 win over the Gamecocks.

In 1939, the Tigers pounded South Carolina, 27-0, on their way to an 8-1 record. At season’s end, Clemson was extended an invitation to its first bowl game—the Cotton Bowl, and of course accepted. The Tigers were scheduled to play the Eagles of Boston College on January 1, 1940 in Dallas, Texas. It was dubbed the “farmer boys” against “the city slickers.”

Most Boston College fans and alumni had never heard of the Tigers prior to the game, which led to Eagles’ head coach Frank Leahy stating he knew “very little about Clemson.” What he learned, however, was the Tigers were led by perhaps the best all-around player in the country in All-American Banks McFadden, who the year before earned All-American status on the basketball court, too, making him the first athlete in the country to earn All-American status in multiple sports.

“That McFadden put a lot of these gray hairs on my head,” Neely told Boston Post reporter Gerry Hern in an article prior to the Cotton Bowl. “I don’t discourage him any. He’s a smart tailback; and if he feels he has worked the team into a bad spot, I like to see him get reckless.

“We’ve scored a few touchdowns on plays I’ve never seen before.”

Neely never had an issue allowing McFadden to improvise, if a player came back to the huddle and told McFadden that a certain play might work, the All-American would instruct his teammate to see if the defensive player made the same mistake twice. If he did, McFadden would expose him on the next play call.

“Every now and then they would make (a play) up on the field,” Neely said. “If I don’t recognize a play, I’m sure Boston coach Frank Leahy won’t.”

Leahy’s team did a good job controlling McFadden on that cold afternoon in Dallas. But after an exchange of punts in the second quarter, the Tigers mounted a 57-yard scoring drive which proved to be the difference in the defensive battle.

McFadden had a 12-yard run and a 16-yard pass to move Clemson deep into Eagles’ territory, where Charlie Timmons went over from the two-yard line to give the Tigers a 6-3 lead. It turned out to be last score of the afternoon.

Timmons led Clemson with 115 yards on 27 carries. And though Boston College, for the most part, contained McFadden on the offensive side of the ball, they had no answer for him on defense. McFadden, who averaged 43 yards per punt on the day as well, reportedly went sideline-to-sideline knocking down Charlie O’Rourke’s passes.

The Eagles finished the afternoon completing only four of 23 passes, with one interception. As a whole, Boston College netted only 102 yards of total offense.

“Clemson is every bit as good as they were cracked up to be,” Leahy told reporters after the game. “We lost to a great team, one of the best I have ever seen. I have the satisfaction of knowing that while we were beaten, the game wasn’t lost on a fluke.”

With the win over Boston College, the Tigers recorded their eight consecutive win to close the season. Clemson finished the season 9-1 overall and ranked No. 12 in the Associated Press’ final poll, the first time the Tigers ended the season ranked in a major poll.