Clemson has become the SEC Media’s worst nightmare.

Now that basketball season has come to end, we’re seeing a lot of off-season college football talk. This week we saw many SEC media types take direct aim at Clemson football.  Following the lead of the Alabama football program, many in the SEC media had a litany of excuses for why Clemson has become their worst nightmare to the dominant SEC football narrative.

Let me be clear… They play good football in the SEC. There’s a lot of NFL talent on many of the teams’ rosters. I even ranked the SEC as the top football in country most of this year. After a fairly pedestrian 6-6 bowl season with multiple blowout losses, certainly the SEC isn’t heads and shoulders of above the rest of the country. They haven’t been for a number of years. It started with Florida State ending their impressive 7 year national championship run by 4 different teams with the 2013 National Title. You know this if you follow college football AT ALL. The fact is ACC teams led by Clemson are 28 – 26 against SEC teams over the last 5 years. This is something SEC Media apologists will quietly dismiss as well. Guess what 5 years of football is a pretty large data point…

Here comes the SEC Media with a backhanded semi-compliment about Clemson.

Just because Clemson gets to play off the Red tees almost all season long, doesn’t mean they aren’t the best golfer.

I’ve always wondered what it would be like if a SEC caliber team played a Pac-12 type schedule.

That’s Clemson right now in the ACC. https://t.co/CdUx4KGKq9

— Peter Burns (@PeterBurnsESPN) April 18, 2019

The ACC was down somewhat last year. Not awful, but there was a lack of top 25 teams.  Was it the red tees when Clemson won the national title in 2016 when the ACC was the best college football conference in the land that year?

Here’s more…

“Clemson’s schedule is so soft. We are talking about one of the easiest schedule in the Power 5. They are 2 TD favorites over everyone on their schedule and the toughest game is at South Carolina” – @SethWalder pic.twitter.com/j3mBz9xCpD

— Paul Finebaum (@finebaum) April 17, 2019

How come this didn’t come up last year when Alabama was a 20+ point favorite against nearly every SEC opponent they played? Naming South Carolina as Clemson’s toughest opponent was laughable at best and at worst shows a complete lack of understanding of Clemson’s opponents. On paper Texas A&M is Clemson’s hardest game. Syracuse, Boston College, NC State and arguably Florida State will be tougher games than South Carolina. Remember this is a Gamecock team coming off a 28-0 bowl game loss to Virginia, and a 21 point loss to Clemson where they played and executed nearly as well as they possibly could.

Clemson has beat South Carolina by a combined 94 points the last 3 years. Let’s be serious that’s not Clemson’s toughest opponent in 2019.

Like the ACC’s record against the SEC the last 5 years, don’t let the facts get in the way off how Clemson blew away every opponent it faced in the 2nd half of last season – not just the ACC teams.

Clemson is 14-1 vs Top 25 teams the past 3 seasons. You can call it a soft schedule, but Tigers own the good teams too.

— Brad Crawford (@BCrawford247) April 17, 2019

Over the last 4 seasons, Alabama has faced 4 SEC teams that finished ranked in the Top 15. Over the same stretch, Clemson faced 6 ACC teams that finished in the Top 15. Info credit to @LarryWilliamsTI

— Chuck in Atlanta (@cfbchuck) April 18, 2019

When Clemson does it, it means the conference is weak. When Alabama does it, it means that they are one of best teams in the history of college football. You can bet the master motivator Dabo Swinney will use the disrespect card once gain. In that regard he’ll probably end up thanking those misguided SEC media members.

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