College Football
Kickoff
A good lesson from the first year of the 12-team College Football Playoff is that it’s a long, long, long season. Last year, most of us wrote off Ohio State after it lost to Michigan, and we saw how that turned out. Plenty wrote off Clemson, before it won the ACC, and many even wrote off Notre Dame after the Irish lost to NIU.
But folks aren’t writing off Clemson now. I felt better about this in May when the Clemson bandwagon was still pretty empty, but now a lot of other folks are jumping on. They’re buying in on Cade Klubnik (No. 1 in The Athletic’s QB Tiers), the receivers, defensive tackle Peter Woods (the No. 5 player on my 2025 Freaks List), Tom Allen coming in to fix the defense, all of it. Heck, even Stew Mandel is starting to like Dabo’s guys again.
I was hedging my bets when predicting Clemson would face Texas again in the CFP, this time for the national title, earlier in the offseason. Now, I’m ready to go all in. I think.
