In a recent episode of the College GameDay Podcast, ESPN’s Rece Davis, Pete Thamel and Dan Wetzel dug into Clemson’s struggles and issues, with the Tigers off to a 1-3 start – their worst start under head coach Dabo Swinney, and the worst since the 2004 season.

Davis used the analogy of “the casserole tastes bad in Clemson” right now.

Thamel agreed “it does not taste good,” adding that “the most worrisome part for Clemson is I don’t see an ingredient that can save the casserole this season.”

“I don’t know how you save this Clemson season,” Thamel said. “They have had – again, you talk about ingredients, right – they have the million-dollar-plus quarterback. They have, from three years ago, the offensive coordinator that was going to rev them up after Brandon Streeter’s offense kind of hit a funk. You can’t argue that they’ve gone forward. They had a spell at the end of last season. But they’ve regressed. It doesn’t seem like the Garrett Riley experiment is going to work past this season. They bring in Tom Allen, and they got absolutely filleted by Syracuse… They just marched up and down the field, virtually unimpeded.”

Thamel went on to say he thinks there’s a “spirit issue” with Clemson, and the Tigers don’t play with the type of edge that they’ve had in years past.

According to Thamel, one coach told him that the Tigers have “lost their stinger.”

“It seems to me that – there’s scheme issues, for sure – but it seems to me there’s a spirit issue, and that’s hard to revive,” Thamel said. “I was talking to a coach on the phone yesterday … He said, ‘Clemson lost their stinger.’ … There’s an edge that they had — victory is inevitable. How many of those close ACC games have they had over the years, where you knew Clemson was going to figure out a way to win at the end. And there was nothing inevitable about Clemson … They just lack, like, a spirit to them, and that’s hard to diagnose. That is very difficult to push forward.”