Clemson’s first-team left guard, Marcus Tate started each of the Tigers’ first 11 games last season.

Unfortunately for Tate, his sophomore campaign came to a sudden halt when he suffered a season-ending knee injury against Miami at Death Valley on Nov. 19. He went down on Clemson’s first possession and had to be helped off the field, and head coach Dabo Swinney announced the following day that Tate needed surgery and would be sidelined for the rest of the season.

Now, Tate is healthy again and ready to return to the field this fall. The 6-foot-5, 325-pounder met with the media on Tuesday following the Tigers’ fourth day of fall camp and detailed the significant injury that he has worked his way back from.

“I tore my MCL and my MPFL because my kneecap fell out and went back in, and then I tore a part of my patellar,” Tate said.

Tate — who has started 19 games over his first two seasons at Clemson since signing with the program as a four-star prospect in December 2020 — said he was back to full strength around this past May.

With Tate ahead of schedule in his rehab this spring, he thinks he probably could have suited up for Clemson’s April 15 spring game if it had been a game that counted.

“I would say around May is when I got cleared for sure,” he said. “But I was feeling good around April. I feel like if the spring game was a real game, I think I could have made a push to play that game, for real. But yeah, I attacked rehab pretty hard, so I was pretty much ready ahead of schedule. But yeah, around May I would say I was full go.”

Tate enters his upcoming junior season having played 1,336 career offensive snaps in 24 career games. The former top-115 national prospect from Florida enrolled at Clemson in January 2021 and became only the third Tiger true freshman offensive lineman since 1972 to start a season opener when he started the 2021 opener against Georgia.

Tate acknowledged that the rehab from last season’s injury was grueling, but he believes he’s now better off for it.

“It was pretty intense,” he admitted. “But the way I looked at it, it’s something I had to deal with. And if I had a bad attitude about it, I know I wouldn’t have got back the way I did. So, I attacked it every day and I made it aggressive for myself, because this is a time I feel like I truly got to work on myself, my body, really lock in on something.

“My focus is just way better than it has been the previous two years just because of this. So, I knew I really had to take advantage of the opportunity to get better and really just focus on my rehab, and that’s what it allowed me to do.”

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