CLEMSON — If you have come to a Clemson Football game at Memorial Stadium in Clemson, you have seen the Tigers’ famed fourth-quarter video.
You know the one. The one where former Clemson strength and conditioning coach Joey Batson yells, “They don’t put championship rings on smooth hands.”
The video not only fires up the crowd and gets the 81,500 in attendance ready for the final quarter. It also signifies a message to the team that dates back to those 5:30 am mat drills on those cold January and February mornings. Those are the workouts that separate the men from the boys and develop a toughness that finds a way to win a football game when it matters the most.
For more than 15 years, Clemson has owned the fourth quarter in college football. During this span, the Tigers are 41-15 in one-possession games, the highest winning percentage in the country.
“You’re in these tight games and when you win those games, it’s confidence and momentum and there’s a lot of things that come with that,” head coach Dabo Swinney said.
However, that was not the case in 2025. Part of the reason the Tigers had their worst season in 15 years was because they were not at their best late in games.
Clemson was uncharacteristically 1-3 in one-score games last year. The three losses: a seven-point loss to LSU; three-point loss to Georgia Tech and one-point loss to Duke.
“It did not go our way last year, and that is my job to make sure when it is at its toughest, that is when we are at our best,” Swinney said.
The goal in the off-season was to find not just a way to make the Tigers stronger, but also mentally tougher. This is where Swinney felt he failed his team last year. He did not have them prepared to win in those tough moments.
“I like how we’ve done some things. It’s one of the reasons we ran those hills,” Swinney said. “It was awesome to watch them because they weren’t very good at the beginning of the summer, none of y’all (the media) would be either. It’s fatigue. Fatigue will coward you, right?
“But by the end of the summer, and it didn’t get easier and they were in great shape in the beginning summer, but it didn’t get easier. They just learned how to handle it — the harder, the better. And it’s the same thing in life, you know, you got to kind of go through some things. Life doesn’t get easier either. But we grow stronger from struggle. If you don’t quit, if you keep pushing yourself, you learn how to handle hard things better that come at you in life. Football is no different. I have seen that in them. Now we got to go take it to the field.”
Clemson will do just that on Sept 5, when the 23rd-ranked Tigers travel to No. 13 LSU to open the season in Baton Rouge, La. As noted, those Tigers defeated Clemson by seven points in Clemson last year.
“We’ve worked hard on that part of it and, you know, we’ll see how it shows up on game day,” Swinney said.