Check out Clemson Sports and Recruiting when you get a chance.

  As previously mentioned, I ‘avoided’ the Blacksburg Beatdown by escaping to my bed after an errant throw gave the hokies the ball on the Tigers 35.  I had a restless night of sleep with all sorts of scores running through my head ranging from a miraculous Wake Forest-esque comeback 3 point win to utter blowouts worse than the actual results.  I awoke the next morning to the loss and was unusually calm.  In fact I came into work and spoke to gamecock and Tiger fans alike with the now worn out excuses of the turnaround from GT, the lack of preparation and the buying into their own hype.  Usually I am a raging inferno similar to that of Broken Gnomes entry a few below this one, but this time I somehow had accepted this loss before it even happened.

  The Tigers have been on a great run, even Gamecock fans (the logical ones that I know) are rooting for the Tigers this season to get the state of SC on the map again.  A single point was the divider between undefeated and a 1 loss team so far this season.  The Tigers were on a 6 game winning streak and had just made the top ten for the first time in 6 years.   The Tiger nation was in an uproar after a routing of #13 Georgia Tech and were looking forward to trouncing another Tech within 5 days to coast their way into a possible ACCCG showing.  Unfortunately reality bit the Tigers in the butt and Virginia Tech came out prepared and showed the nation why they continue to be one of the hardnosed football programs in the ACC.  I am not sure how they lost to Georgia Tech or BC but they decided to turn the game on Clemson at the right time in the season.  And through it all I had a sensation that unranked VT would be the turning point but couldn’t figure out why that game had my gut wrenching more than the previously ranked Jackets.  That was until I looked back in the season.

  You see, earlier in the year whilst everyone was foaming at the mouth over the upcoming season with Anthony Waters, Tremaine Billie, Gaines Adams, James Davis and the supposed perfect fit QB Will Proctor coming into the game I had made some predictions on the season.  I remembered this entry after the Tigers loss to Virginia Tech and thought I would look it up to see how the Tigers season is matching up and amazingly, we are right in line with what I expected.  Check is out HERE.  A loss to Virginia Tech was in the cards as I saw it and a 10-2 record is what I called way back when.  So while I was sitting around wondering why I was so unusually calm with the loss to Virginia Tech, I guess in the back of my mind I had already accepted it at the beginning of the season.

  So the Tigers are 7-2 with 3 home games left against a shaky Maryland and NC State team as well as Spurriers first visit to Death Valley.  The Tigers are coming home folks for the ride to the bowls and the potential to go 10-2 and with a bowl win 11-2.  Now is that so bad?!  Yeah they looked like they would roll the rest of the season but maybe that VT loss is just what they needed to get into high gear.  And now all the young guys on the team have that acrid taste of ”what could have been” to remember for the rest of their career.  And as noted as response to my last post, the ACCCG could….could still happen, just hope Wake comes through.  This VT loss may have a silver lining folks, let’s just make sure that we give the homefield advantage as much as we can these next few weeks and hope the Tigers get to 10-2. 

Turtle Soup on Saturday!!!

The blog was down for a while this morning, and now you’ll notice that the design is changed back to uber-generic.

While trying to import all the old posts and comments into wordpress, I managed to delete the old template which of course I didn’t backup because nothing was going to go wrong.

Hopefully better things will be just around the corner.

UPDATE: I may have forgotten to back things up, but fortunately Google’s cache doesn’t. If you can’t tell that anything is different, then just assume a large quantity of alcohol is making me hallucinate.

After the negative response to the previous motivational posters, an aspiring gnome, currently known as Skippy, and I have begun a new campaign. You can check out some rough drafts over in the Sporting Gnomes Photo Gallery. Leave comments and/or suggestions! They are currently in 1024×768 format which fits nicely into any computers backgrounds.

Down at the bottom of an article about pre-season rankings, there’s another article about a local businessman who’s using sales of his product to directly fund Clemson.

Seneca businessman Joe “Coach” Crosby, creator of Coach’s Low Country Boil Seasoning and owner of the T-60 Grill restaurant in Fair Play, is donating some of the profits from sales of his popular seasoning to Clemson University.

For each bottle of seasoning, 1 dollar will go to athletics and 1 dollar will go to academics. 25% of the academic money is designated for the Call Me MISTER program.

There is no word if the donation from each bottle will be given in the form of a tiger-paw stamped two dollar bill.

You know the “inside” story and history behind everything listed in THIS article. If you don’t know the stories, you need to get to Tiger Town and pick up some publications. You also are not or ever have been a proper Clemson student as those stories are fused into your bones through the experience “where the blue ridge yawns it’s greatness.”

Athlon has started ranking teams by their separate lines and positions. So far Clemson is representing in the top ten in a majority of the lists. Here is what has been published so far:

Running Backs:
6. Clemson

Receiving Corps:
5. ClemsonClemson’s Chansi Stuckey is the top returning receiver in the Atlantic Coast Conference after leading the league in receptions per game in 2005 with 5.33, exceeding even Georgia Tech’s Calvin Johnson’s total. Stuckey caught 64 passes, four for scores, and was first-team All-ACC. He also handles punt return duties for the Tigers — he scored the only touchdown of the game for Clemson on a runback in the season opener against Texas A&M. Also returning is Aaron Kelly, the ACC’s top freshman receiver in 2005 with 47 catches, the second-most pass receptions by a freshman in school history. Stuckey has caught at least one pass in each of the 21 games he has played; Kelly caught at least two passes in each game last fall.

Offensive Line:
6. Clemson

Linebackers:
2. ClemsonClemson returns its top three tacklers from 2005 — linebackers Anthony Waters, Nick Watkins and Tramaine Billie. Waters, who anchors the group from his post in the middle, is the top returning tackler in the ACC, having chalked up 109 total stops, including 13.5 for a loss, in 2005. He also broke up seven passes. Watkins had 99 tackles and an INT from his weak-side spot. Billie is fighting off the challenge of Antonio Clay, who came up with 27 tackles as a freshman, on the strong side.

And that is all ranked in comparison to THE NATION not the ACC.

Now Athlon doesn’t seem to be the most reliable source for sports logic with Oklahoma as their preseason favorite and that annoying bandwagon group of leprechauns (gnomes have a natural distaste for the little buggars) at 2. Clemson is ranked at #12, which makes you drool for that first kick of the season, but is a bit generous in my mind.

Check back on Athlon to keep up with the rest of the rankings though.

If you have been living under a rock, or are potentially just not that aware of your surroundings and have not yet gotten the memo, you should be reading Mickey Plyler’s blog on a daily basis.