Wow.
Let me re-iterate, amplify: wow.
As a Clemson graduate (I finished my MA in Professional Communication in 2009), and a current FSU doctoral student, I do feel some cognitive dissonance when the two teams face each other on field. They are ACC titans both, or so the story goes. Which team should I support? I decided when I moved to Tallahassee that I would root for the Noles when they play any other team, but when the Tigers face the Seminoles of FSU, I would still bleed orange.
And I bled last weekend. I bled a lot.
I did not expect Clemson to beat FSU, though I hoped we would win. I did expect a football game, though, and not the extended, humiliating, merciless drubbing that FSU delivered from the first quarter all the way to the fourth.
We started strong:
Then, in the first quarter, fumbles. Turnovers. We began getting used to images like this:
D’oh!
And then they began to score. And the majority of the remainder of the game looked like this:
Slow down! How am I supposed to tackle you?
Just wow. Though I’m ashamed to admit it, there is a phenomenon, among college football fans, known as “Clemsoning.” Basically, it’s when you raise expectations to the ceiling, and then choke in a humiliating way, much the same way we lost, to West Virginia in the 2012 Orange Bowl, when Darwin Cook took the football away from Andre Ellington, who was almost in the endzone, in the first quarter, to run 99 yards and score, and begin a 70-33 thrashing that no one even remotely expected.
Still, I wore my Clemson hat into the FSU campus last Monday, and I wore it all day long. Because even though some days being a Clemson Tiger is pretty painful, I’ll still take them over the alternatives, any day. Call it insanity. We call it loyalty.
Dave's Football Blog 