BATON ROUGE, La. — There was a lot of excitement for Saturday’s game at LSU.

It was Lane Kiffin’s first game as the Bayou Bengals coach. Clemson, with two-time national champion head coach Dabo Swinney, was coming to town. ESPN’s College GameDay was on hand.

LSU and Clemson fans packed Tiger Stadium where more than 102,000 people–mostly wearing gold and purple–showed up. Everyone was ready for an exciting game. Unfortunately, the only exciting thing they saw was the fireworks show after LSU’s 51-10 victory.

The Tigers of LSU completed their home-and-home series sweep of Clemson, by completely embarrassing the ACC Tigers on national television.

It was so bad, it was almost as if LSU was playing an FCS opponent in a warmup game instead of Clemson, who just six years earlier was one of college football’s biggest powers and beating the likes of Alabama, Ohio State, Oklahoma and Notre Dame.

After Saturday’s performance, you wonder if Clemson can beat Georgia Southern or Charleston Southern.

This was the same Clemson program that played LSU in the College Football Playoff National Championship Game in 2020. This is not what is supposed to happen. Not with Swinney as a head coach. Not with Chad Morris running the offense. Not with Tom Allen running the defense.

Clemson’s defense, for decades, had the reputation of dominating opposing teams. They are supposed to be the intimidators.

But that is no longer the case. It has been a long time since this writer has seen Clemson look so bad and be such an embarrassment for a school that has such a rich football history.

You have to go back to a 54-7 loss to Florida in 2000 to find a game where Clemson looked this incompetent. Following that game, FSU head coach Bobby Bowden told his son, then Clemson head coach Tommy Bowden, he needs to go recruit.

But as bad as that game was, Clemson was still an 8-1 team at the time and ranked No. 10 in the country. That was just a bad night for what was a good football team.

Saturday’s loss to LSU was not just a bad night, it was an awful night. And this does not look like a good Clemson team.

This was Dabo Swinney’s worse loss of his career, beating West Virginia’s 37-point win over Clemson in the 2012 Orange Bowl and worse than the Seminoles’ 37-point win at Clemson’s Death Valley in 2013.

After Clemson’s second scrimmage in fall camp, Dabo Swinney was asked about his team and who was showing off in practice. He said no one really. He said, “right now we have a bunch of nobodies.”

Well, he is right. Clemson played like a team that has “a bunch of nobodies” on Saturday night. And that’s embarrassing.