Farmers Fighting For That Bowl Bid

Leave it to the Clempsun Farmers (a.k.a. Clemson Tigers) to inject a little drama into beating Duke and Virginia.

In successive must-win games, Clempsun (6-5, 4-4 ACC) notched back-to-back victories over these two bottom-feeding Anybody Can Compete programs, keeping dreams of a second-tier bowl game alive up in Farmertown, U.S.A.

Clempsun also moved to 3-2 under interim head coach Dabo Swinney, which means that a lot more than just bragging rights could be at stake when the South Carolina Gamecocks head to Death Valley on November 29.

If Clempsun beats South Carolina and becomes bowl-eligible, Swinney will have a 4-2 mark that includes a “W” over the hated Gamecocks and a road victory over a halfway decent Boston College team.

Plus he’ll get another month of practice and the opportunity to coach in a bowl game.

Under those circumstances, we bet he’s offered the job … particularly seeing as the Tigers’ other top targets don’t seem to be panning out, and seeing as the players at Clempsun have obviously embraced Swinney, with star running back CJ Spiller going so far as to say he’ll stick around for another year if the Tigers retain their interim coach.

Also, Clemson safety Michael Hamlin said he is considering writing a letter to Clempsun president James Barker urging him to support Swinney – or more likely instructing an academic tutor to write the letter for him.

Should the Farmers fall short against the Shamecocks, however, we don’t see any way Swinney sticks around – at least not as head coach.

So it’s a big game …

But try this one on for size …

Based on South Carolina’s atrocious performance last week against the Florida Gators, we feel compelled to once again ask a question that’s getting a bit too familiar for our liking … is the wrong coach on the hot seat (again) this week?

At the end of his fourth season in Columbia, USC head coach Steve Spurrier is just 28-20 with a 15-17 SEC record. By contrast, Spurrier lost only twelve SEC games (and 27 total games) at Florida – in twelve seasons.

Also, Spurrier’s recruiting sucks and his kids can’t seem to stay out of trouble off the field.

We’ve gotten a lot of grief in the past for daring to challenge the football omnipotence of “Darth Visor,” but this is frankly a point that needs to be raised … as if the 56-6 ass-cutting the Shamecocks received on national television down in “The Swamp” didn’t sufficiently beg the question …

And of course when we say “beg the question,” we mean its generally-accepted colloquial use, not the circulus in probando fallacy of logic first exposed by Aristotle in 350 B.C. – a year that not surprisingly also featured a mediocre South Carolina football team.

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