By Will Vandervort
There have been a lot of great moments in Clemson sports in this last year, but we at The Clemson Insider made a list of what we think are the five best moments of the 2013 calendar year.
Our best moment actually occurred in the final hours of 2012, but it carried the Tigers and its fans for more than eight months leading up to the 2013 football season. Clemson kicker Chandler Catanzaro made a 37-yard field goal as time expired to lift the Tigers to a come-from-behind 25-24 victory over No. 7 LSU in the Chick-fil-A Bowl. Catanzaro’s winning field goal was set up by one play and that play is called:
Fourth and 16: — No one will ever forget “The Catch.” Jerry Butler’s leaping, twisting grab of a Steve Fuller pass in the final seconds that helped Clemson beat archrival South Carolina, 31-27, in 1977.
Butler’s leaping grab rung in a new era for Clemson football that four years later led to a national championship and the greatest decade in the program’s storied history.
The verdict is still out on what could happen following the victory over LSU in the 2012 Chick-fil-A Bowl, but there is a good chance Tajh Boyd’s 26-yard pass to DeAndre Hopkins in the closing minute of the game will be simply known as “Fourth-and-16.”
Like a lot of plays that will forever be remembered, a lot of things had to take place to set it up. First of all, LSU chose to throw the football on the previous possession on three straight plays, catching one for eight yards and then throwing incomplete on the other two. The second incompletion was due to defensive end Malliciah Goodman getting his big hand up and batting Zach Mettenberger’s third down pass to the ground.
The two incompletions allowed Clemson to keep all of its timeouts intact. The Tigers caught another break on the LSU punt. Jamie Keehn’s punt hit around the Clemson 10 and then bounced into the end zone just in front of an LSU defender who was trying to down the football inside the 10-yard line.
“We get the ball back. This is what we work all the time on,” Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney said. “It was one minute and 39 seconds to go, we had all three timeouts and a field goal wins it.
“We do that in our sleep.”
The Tigers were sleeping at first. On first down, Boyd threw a pass to Hopkins that was a little high and sailed through the All-American receiver’s hands. On the next snap, Clemson went back to the same play, but again the ball was thrown too tall and the Tigers faced third down-and-10 from the 20.
Facing a big third down, LSU defensive end Sam Montgomery barreled through Clemson’s much maligned offensive line to sack Boyd for a six-yard loss.
It was “Fourth-and-16” from the Clemson 14-yard line. The Tigers called timeout. Things looked bleak.
“It was fourth-and-16 and we had one play that we talked about at halftime,” Swinney said.
That one play was a switch play with two seams, with the receivers crossing. When Boyd walked up to the line, he saw the coverage and noticed someone had the inside guy. Hopkins then got past LSU safety and consensus All-American Eric Reid and Boyd delivered a perfect strike.
“Nuk kind of squirted by one high and I didn’t really know he was going to get on top of him like that so I kind of released a little bit early, but again, being the kind of receiver he is, he always finds the ball in the air,” Boyd said.
Again, everything had to go right for the play to work. When Hopkins broke inside, Reid gave chase. Normally Reid would look back to find the ball in situations like that, but in this instance he did not. Had the All-American safety turned around, he would have been in position to swat the football away and end the game.
Instead, the ball flew about five inches from his left hand and right into the arms of a sliding Hopkins, who caught the ball at the 40-yard line. It was a perfect pass by Boyd. Thrown where only Hopkins could have caught it.
“It was just a ridiculous play,” Boyd said. “I could not really see it because some of these guys are 6-5 and 6-6 so just hearing the roars of the Clemson crowd was a great feeling and a great sound.”
Five plays and a pass inference penalty later, Clemson moved the football to the LSU 20, setting up Chandler Catanzaro’s 37-yard game-winning field goal as time expired.
“We don’t always make fourth-and-16, but we certainly have been in that situation many times with our defense in practice,” Swinney said.
And like they say, “practice makes perfect.” And there was little doubt Clemson executed “Fourth-and-16” perfectly.
2) Baseball gets on a role: Jack Leggett’s baseball team has one of the best runs in recent history as the Tigers won 23 of 27 games at one point in the 2013 season, including 11- and 9-game winning streaks. The run carries the Tigers to a second place finish in the ACC’s Atlantic Division and another invitation to the NCAA baseball tournament, the program’s 27th appearance in the last 28 years.
3) Murray sacks Corso: ESPN’s College GameDay made its second appearance of the year in Clemson for the Florida State game as No. 3 Clemson hosted the No. 5 Seminoles in a key ACC showdown. As co-host Lee Corso was making his pick, while dressed up like Chief Osceola, celebrity guest picker Bill Murray tackled Corso to the ground and then pinned him like a wrestler while thousands of Clemson fans laughed and cheered. It is considered the greatest moment in College GameDay history.
4) Tigers take down No. 5 Georgia: Clemson became the first non-Southeastern Conference team in college football history to defeat top-10 SEC opponents in consecutive games with its 38-35 win over Georgia. A back-and-forth affair throughout, the No. 8 Tigers opened up a double-digit lead in the fourth quarter on Stanton Seckinger’s nine-yard touchdown catch from Boyd and hung on to defeat the No. 5 Bulldogs in the first season-opening meeting of top-10 teams in school history. Clemson had defeated No. 7 LSU 25-24 in the Chick-fil-A Bowl to end last season and set up its shot to make history against Georgia.
5) McDaniels powers Tigers past Gamecocks: Needing some kind of spark after the visiting Gamecocks whittled away at what was once a 13-point lead, K.J. McDaniels took it upon himself to be the guy that provided a spark for the Tigers. The junior forward scored seven of the next 10 points as Clemson went on a 10-1 run to seize control of the game and never looked back in a 71-57 victory at Littlejohn Coliseum. McDaniels scored nine of his game-high 21 points after Carrera’s layup, while energizing his teammates at the same time.