An entire season-long journey into a new land, a 12-team playoff, wound its way along a path of wild twists and turns to this moment on a cold December night in Charlotte. A season that began in August came down to the very last play of the non-playoff season. Pushing toward midnight in the final conference championship game to end on Saturday, the Clemson Tigers struck a dramatic blow that served three purposes at once.
Freshman Nolan Hauser’s 56-yard, walk-off field goal in the Atlantic Coast Conference championship game put 10–3 Clemson in the playoff with a 34–31 win over the SMU Mustangs. In the process, the Tigers stole a playoff bid from someone else. If there is any justice or sense in the world, the team that is out is the zombie monster that just kept coming back from the dead, the 9–3 Alabama Crimson Tide. And it verified 11–2 SMU as a playoff team.
In the end—the very, very end—the ACC threaded the multi-bid needle. After some committee disrespect and a year of infighting, with league members Florida State and Clemson suing the ACC over its grant of media rights agreement, the ACC stuck the landing.
This result doesn’t do much for the 10–2 Miami Hurricanes, who were dropped behind Alabama on Tuesday in the CFP rankings—a dubious decision that irritated ACC leadership and also stirred up year-old anger over the Tide jumping the undefeated Florida State Seminoles to make the last four-team playoff. But this was the result the ACC needed—a Clemson victory in a close, competitive game that should preclude SMU from dropping from three spots ahead of Alabama to behind the Tide.
“It would be criminal if we’re not in,” SMU coach Rhett Lashlee said just after midnight ET. “It would be wrong on so many levels. It would be wrong for so much that college football stands for. We just played a playoff game out there, basically, and we played pretty danged good. … We showed up and we competed our butts off. We should be in, they know we should be in. So we’ll see what happens.”
Clemson coach Dabo Swinney endorsed SMU as a playoff team immediately afterward.
“They better be in the dang playoff,” he said.
Alabama fans were taken on an emotional roller coaster watching this game. What actually transpired was the worst possible outcome. For a long time, this looked like it would be a Clemson blowout of SMU, which threatened to create a scenario in which the committee drops the Mustangs out of the playoff and keeps Bama in.
Down 31–14 entering the fourth quarter, SMU mounted a furious rally with its pyrotechnic (but erratic) offense. The Mustangs scored 17 points in 13 minutes to tie the game with 16 seconds left, seemingly sending the game toward overtime. But Clemson made three huge plays to pull this out in regulation, and seemingly to knock Alabama out of playoff contention.
The first was a 41-yard kickoff return by Adam Randall to the Clemson 45-yard line—the Tigers’ longest return of the season. The second, with nine seconds left, was a pass from Cade Klubnik to Antonio Williams for 17 yards. That play, followed by a timeout, gave Clemson the chance to try the long-bomb kick for the win.
Out trotted Hauser, from nearby Cornelius, N.C., for his chance to become a Clemson hero. He’d made 16 of 21 field goals on the season, but missed earlier in the game from 44 yards. And this would be his career long by five yards.
With a crisp snap by Holden Caspersen and a good hold by Swinney’s son Clay, Hauser drilled the kick into the air—and just long enough to clear the crossbar. (The kick might have been good from 57, but not 58. It was close.) That set off a Clemson eruption, with players rushing onto the field and the elder Swinney sprinting across the artificial turf.
It was a remarkable comeback from the brink for Clemson. How many times were the Tigers counted out? At least three, once for every loss. There was a 31-point blowout to start the season against the Georgia Bulldogs. Then there was a 33–21 home loss to the Louisville Cardinals to start November. And the 17–14 home loss to end the month, against the rival South Carolina Gamecocks.
That outcome made this ACC title tilt a make-or-break game for Clemson. Win, and the Tigers were in. Lose, and they’re not even close.
They rose to the occasion. Aided by a couple of huge first-quarter turnovers by the otherwise-electric SMU quarterback Kevin Jennings, Clemson jumped to a 21–7 lead in less than 12 minutes. A Hauser field goal extended the lead to 17 at halftime, and the margin was still 17 entering the final quarter. That’s when the drama kicked into high gear.
Clemson made the four-team playoff six years in a row, from 2015 to ’21, and won the national championship twice in that span. But the Tigers missed the field the last three seasons, prompting great angst about whether Swinney had lost his mojo. That intensified this season when it looked like Clemson wouldn’t even make the expanded version of the playoff.
In the end, the Tigers are back again in the title hunt. They might end up being the No. 12 seed when the bracket is revealed at noon ET Sunday, which could entail a frigid road game in South Bend or State College, Pa. That won’t be easy, but Clemson earned its chance.
And so did SMU. It would be a travesty of the highest order if losing a 13th game by three points at the gun drops them behind a team with a worse record that was sitting at home this weekend.
So in all likelihood the ACC will be the third multi-bid conference in the tournament, along with the Big Ten (four teams) and SEC (three). That was in doubt until the final play of the final game, but when Hauser’s kick cleared the crossbar, it cleared the way for two teams from this beleaguered league to make the playoff.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Clemson’s Walk-Off Win Over SMU Should Give ACC Multiple CFP Bids.
