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12 Jun 2024, 00:00

Editor’s note: This is part of The Athletic’s Tales from Bowl Season series exploring some of the best and quirkiest stories from past bowl games.

To comprehend the incessant beating Clemson absorbed at the Orange Bowl on Jan. 4, 2012, try talking to a disbelieving blackjack player who lost 15 consecutive hands. Or a maintenance worker who spent hours pressure-washing graffiti away only to invite more spray-painting scoundrels.

Such was West Virginia 70, Clemson 33.

It seemed inconceivable then, and it still cramps the mind 10 years later, now that the Tigers own two more national championships and the Mountaineers have yet to return to a major bowl.

Geno Smith threw six touchdowns, Tavon Austin roasted the defense on four of them, and West Virginia scored the most points in bowl history. “We shocked ourselves that game,” said left tackle Don Barclay.

The over/under for the game was set at 64 points, meaning the Mountaineers beat that total by themselves, and nearly did so in three quarters. It was a fantastic and frenzied night for first-year coach Dana Holgorsen, whose team emerged from a three-way tiebreaker as Big East co-champs thanks to being the only one ranked.

“We were lucky to even be there,” said safeties coach Steve Dunlap, referring to West Virginia’s string of narrow wins over Cincinnati (24-21), Pitt (21-20) and South Florida (30-27) that ended the regular season.

For an underdog bunch, Miami represented the ideal escape. And for Clemson, a painful awakening.

Tavon Austin special

Clemson wasn’t ready for the “sugar huddle” that West Virginia’s offensive staff installed during the 34-day break after the regular-season finale. It’s the close-to-the-line huddle whereby the offense bursts into place, essentially hiding the formation and forcing the defense to scramble.

“They always set their formation to the field with the nickelback, so we would tempo out of the sugar huddle and shoot to a formation into a boundary to get them into a different check,” said West Virginia quarterbacks coach Jake Spavital, now the head coach at Texas State. “Then we’d get into the quick-motion with Tavon.

“We knew Clemson was very talented up front, and we had to get it going sideline to sideline. And Tavon, obviously, was a special talent.”

Austin dazzled on the “fly sweep,” turning presnap motion into a blistering sprint and turning Smith’s volleyball-style touch passes into scores of 8, 3 and 27 yards. Everything the Mountaineers dialed up was hitting. Smith scrambled for a touchdown, and old-school tailback Shawne Alston — the 230-pounder who subsequently filed a landmark suit against the NCAA — ran for two scores.

Over the final three regular-season games, West Virginia’s offense had scored six touchdowns. Against Clemson, it rang up that many by halftime. The 49-20 lead was such a runaway that when Train performed the halftime show, WVU coaches allowed several backup quarterbacks to sit in the tunnel and listen.

West Virginia’s offensive show continued humming in the third quarter, with back-to-back scoring drives of 73 and 74 yards. One of them came when Austin ran a slant route out of the slot and juked two defensive backs on a 37-yard score.

Spavital wondered whether Clemson was fired up for the bowl coming off the ACC championship game but sensed his guys “were extremely motivated for that game,” especially Miami-area natives like Smith and receiver Stedman Bailey.

After the game, the Fontainebleau team hotel became tantamount to “Almost Heaven” with players, coaches, administrators and families reveling in the record blowout. Spavital forfeited sleep and stayed up until it was time to catch an early-morning flight to Cleveland, where he made a recruiting visit with future All-Big 12 center Tyler Orlosky. That felt like two wins in 24 hours.

Another perk for Spavital: becoming close friends with the bowl’s hospitality reps. So close that in 2019, during his first season as head coach at Texas State, the group made a special trip through San Marcos to see his Bobcats play. “The whole Orange Bowl committee stopped by to see our game,” he said, “and I even got them to wear their orange jackets.”

West Virginia fans revel in the Mountaineers’ 70-33 blowout victory over Clemson in the Orange Bowl on Jan. 4, 2012. (Courtesy of Dale Sparks)

Cracking down the stretch

Clemson entered 2011 fresh off a 6-7 season in 2010, which is still Dabo Swinney’s only losing season as Tigers head coach. Behind quarterback Tajh Boyd, Clemson started with an 8-0 record and worked its way up to a No. 6 ranking in the AP poll.

The Tigers started to crack down the stretch, though, and dropped three of their final four regular-season games, including at rival South Carolina. After beating Virginia Tech 38-10 in the ACC championship, Clemson entered the Orange Bowl against West Virginia as a three-point favorite.

“What I remember about that game is going into it, feeling ourselves a little bit too much. I think we saw them at a function and saw how small they were — like, some of their best players,” said former Tigers cornerback Xavier Brewer, now the cornerbacks coach at Louisiana-Monroe.

“And so that’s not off to a good start. Especially when those little guys happen to be, you know, Tavon Austin. … Some pretty freaking good football players embarrassed us for not respecting the game.”

Brewer remembers the Tigers racking up missed tackles galore and starting to spiral after a game-changing sequence in the second quarter.

The fallout would lead to the firing of defensive coordinator Kevin Steele and the hiring of Brent Venables, one of the most revered defensive coordinators in college football, who only just departed to take the head coaching job at Oklahoma.

“Next thing you know, you had what you had — and a defining moment for so many people,” Venables told The Athletic this week. “Certainly myself.”

‘I get chills’

Turns out that staying at the iconic Fontainebleau in South Beach was a distraction for the Mountaineers. One they enjoyed immensely.

“We were mesmerized by all the famous people,” Barclay said. “Nicki Minaj was there, and Rhianna, and the Harry Potter guy.”

The rapper Flo Rida had his Bugatti roped off near the entrance, and Deadmau5 played a New Year’s Eve show.

“Plus those rooms were so luxurious overlooking the ocean. Everyone thought we were the coolest people on earth,” Barclay said.

As a true freshman who was redshirting in 2007, Barclay remembers traveling to road games and following lights-out curfew to the minute so as not to run afoul of coach Rich Rodriguez. Under Holgorsen, the bowl atmosphere was looser, and the older players stayed up later playing card games like Texas hold ’em and Tonk.

The relaxed guidelines didn’t detract from Barclay’s desperate desire to win his final game as a fifth-year senior. Having earned All-Big East accolades, he was excited to test himself against ACC sacks leader Andre Branch, who wound up being selected 38th in the subsequent NFL Draft. Four defensive linemen on that Tigers depth chart were drafted.

“We had a dinner with Clemson and when we saw their D-linemen it was like, ‘Damn, they’re pretty big,’” Barclay said. “We didn’t get the five-stars at West Virginia, so we prided ourselves on hard work and tenacity, and we were never scared in those moments.”

He credited strength coach Mike Joseph — “the blood and sweat behind that program” — for offseason development and admired the influence of Bill Bedenbaugh, who left for Oklahoma a year later and has become the nation’s premier offensive line coach.

“I was lucky to run into Bedenbaugh along my path because he helped put a good nasty streak in me,” said Barclay, who played five NFL seasons as an undrafted free agent. “He started every padded practice with an offensive line version of the Oklahoma drill, and it just got you in that physical mindset.

“And the thing I really appreciated most that year is that he treated me like a veteran and talked to me one-on-one about the other guys. Would ask me ‘How does the room feel?’ I appreciated that trust.”

The room felt confident entering the game, and by the time West Virginia pulled ahead 21-17 early in the second quarter, Barclay said the unit realized “we can do this.”

The barrage of touchdowns that ensued caught even the Mountaineers by surprise, as did one of the celebrations. Barclay was ambushed in the end zone by his brother Beau, a WVU student manager, after a third-quarter score.

“He just ran down and jumped on me,” Barclay said. “By that point, I think we had 50 on the board, so the refs didn’t do anything about it.”

Last summer, he popped in that DVD and watched the game again.

“I loved my time at West Virginia, and it couldn’t have ended any better,” Barclay said. “I get chills thinking about it.”

Tavon Austin (1), who scored four touchdowns in the rout, leads his teammates in the Orange Bowl celebration. (Courtesy of Ben Queen)

Underdog moxie

Dunlap, the West Virginia assistant, had long believed in and fed off the program’s underdog moxie. It was baked-in for a kid raised in Hurricane, W.Va., who starred at linebacker for the Mountaineers during the mid-1970s, then served on West Virginia staffs under Frank Cignetti, Don Nehlen, Bill Stewart and Holgorsen.

A month shy of his 58th birthday, Dunlap arrived in Miami well aware that Clemson was favored. Though the betting spread was a mere three points, the talent gap seemed more lopsided. After all, the Tigers had signed 26 top-300 players in their previous four recruiting classes compared with West Virginia’s 10.

Even more worrisome, Dunlap’s secondary was missing a key player. Safety Terence Garvin, the team’s third-leading tackler, who went on to appear in 75 NFL games, required knee surgery after the regular season. In his place, the starting assignment fell to Wes Tonkery, a true freshman who had made four tackles all season.

“We get down there in Miami and all we hear is Clemson, Clemson, Clemson,” Dunlap said. “So by the time the game comes, our players are so pissed off they can’t see straight.”

The team that barely eked out the Big East tiebreaker came in motivated and recharged. “Clemson had watched the same film of us that we did, and they probably thought we were pushovers,” Dunlap said.

West Virginia’s defense wasn’t exactly fierce that season — finishing 61st in points allowed (26.8) and 49th in takeaways — though it ranked 25th in yards allowed per play (4.92) and featured five future NFL players, including first-rounder Bruce Irvin. Still, Clemson piled up 275 yards on the first four possessions and was netting 8.8 per play early in the second quarter when Andre Ellington took a first-and-goal handoff at the 3 and surged into a pile near the goal line.

Then Mountaineers sophomore safety Darwin Cook came out of the scrum with the ball and raced 99 yards in the opposite direction. West Virginia had a 28-17 lead.

Instead of going up 24-21, as Clemson would have with a touchdown there, the Tigers trailed by double digits. They never recovered.

“I’m like, ‘Surely that’s not happening?’” said Clemson’s Swinney. “And next thing you know, instead of going up, you’re down.”

Dunlap was agog upstairs in the West Virginia coaching booth. He recruited Cook from gang-riddled East Cleveland, where the kid endured academic struggles and played out of position as a 180-pound defensive end. What stood out was Cook’s 10.6 time in the 100 meters, which gave WVU coaches hope he could develop as a defensive back — even if Cook had no idea how to backpedal in coverage.

“He had no idea at all how to play safety that first year,” said Dunlap, noting that they studied film one-on-one because Cook was reluctant to ask basic questions during position group meetings.

Cook’s strip-and-score was the first of Clemson’s four turnovers, with the following three committed by Boyd. West Virginia converted each takeaway into a touchdown.

West Virginia outscored Clemson 35-3 in the second quarter with the turnover frenzy.

“Then we come down and kick it off and daggum if we don’t turn it over, (they) score. Kick it off, (they) score. It was crazy,” Swinney said. “That was a bad night.”

Eric Mac Lain, now an analyst on the ACC Network and a Clemson redshirt tight end at the time, summed it up:

“It literally felt like every time they touched the ball, they scored,” he said, before coming back to the fumble. “We’re just like, ‘What the hell is happening?’ It was just plays like that over and over that just didn’t make sense.”

The part that made sense to Dunlap was Clemson taking the Mountaineers lightly, “because 19- and 20-year-olds aren’t mature enough to know that anybody can beat you any day.

“Clemson was a really good football team, but we dismantled them.”

West Virginia’s defensive staff was dismantled within days, as coordinator Jeff Casteel, defensive line coach Bill Kirelawich and cornerbacks coach David Lockwood headed to Arizona to be reunited with Rich Rodriguez.

Dunlap, who took over the outside linebackers the following season in what would be his 35th and final year as a college coach, recalled driving along Interstate 79 near Morgantown a few days later and seeing a university-sponsored billboard.

It read: “70: It’s not just our speed limit.”

It was a festive time for the Mountaineers, culminating with this raucous scene in the locker room. West Virginia led Clemson 49-20 at halftime and continued to pour it on. “Clemson was a really good football team, but we dismantled them,” left tackle Don Barclay said. (Courtesy of Dale Sparks)

‘Where’s Milt?’

Around the time West Virginia led 63-26, Clemson offensive coordinator Chad Morris started yelling for the team psychologist.

Morris, now a high school coach in Texas, had met Milt Lowder, Clemson’s psychologist, during the 2011 spring practice period after Swinney hired Morris as offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach from Tulsa. Lowder had been with Swinney since 2009 but was new to Morris, who made quite a first impression.

“(Morris) didn’t know who the hell Milt was,” Swinney said, recalling one particularly unforgettable practice. “Tajh had, I don’t know, threw a pick or something at the end of practice, and Chad’s out there doing his offensive stuff and the next thing, he looks over there and he’s chomping his gum … and he’s like, ‘Who the hell’s talking to my quarterback? Who is this guy?’”

Lowder explained to Morris who he was, but not without Morris ripping into him first. It wasn’t long before Morris started to buy into what Lowder shared with the team throughout the season, though. And when West Virginia continued to clobber Clemson in the third quarter, Morris needed some calming down.

“It’s just awful in the third quarter and I’ll never forget it: He’s chomping that gum, he’s chomping, we’re in the headsets,” Swinney said. “And he starts going, ‘Yeah, WHERE THE HELL IS MILT NOW? I NEED MILT. WHERE’S MILT?”’

“He’s screaming in the headset, ‘WHERE’S MILT? I NEED MILT. I DON’T SEE HIM NOW.’

“It was one of the funniest moments ever in a really bad, bad, bad time.”

Positive outlook

Brewer remembers being in the Clemson locker room afterward.

“Very deflated,” he said. “Embarrassed. (Those are) the only words you can really put to it.”

Swinney decided to zoom out with his postgame speech to his team and try to instill some optimism.

“Oh, that was painful,” he said. “But I remember very clearly meeting with our team afterward and saying, ‘You know what? This was a bad moment, but man, what a year we had. We’re building.’”

Swinney reminded his team that Clemson had just won 10 games in a season for the first time since 1990. He was quick to point out that the Tigers had just competed in the Orange Bowl for the first time in 30 years, since they won the 1981 national championship.

“I also remember very clearly, and I said it to the press, ‘It won’t be 30 years before we’re at the Orange Bowl again.’ And if I remember correctly, we were there two years later,” Swinney said. “And we beat Ohio State.”

Indeed, for as atrocious as the 2012 Orange Bowl was for Clemson, it’s largely pointed to as one of the most important games of the Swinney era.

The loss prompted the hire of Venables. (West Virginia also courted him during the January coaches convention, though by that point he had homed in on the Clemson job.)

Venables said he had been watching Clemson and rooting for the Tigers for about a year prior to the Orange Bowl because of the admiration he had for the way the up-and-coming Swinney ran his program. Clemson seemed genuine, he said, and looked like a team that had fun.

He also liked Clemson’s chances against the Mountaineers.

“I just remember thinking, ‘Clemson’s gonna blow these dudes out,’” he said.

Venables, who was then co-defensive coordinator at Oklahoma, said he watched part of the game from a recruit’s home in Tulsa, Okla., and thought Clemson had control until he saw the Ellington fumble. Later that night, he got home and saw the final score, which reminded him of how a few key breaks can change a game. Or lives.

“Within a week, I’m on a plane with my wife to go to Clemson, and I’m like, ‘What town is Clemson in?’” Venables said. “And Coach Swinney’s like, ‘Clemson.’ And I’m like, ‘What? That’s a town?”’

Venables said Swinney would be the first to say that his decision to change coordinators was not because of the Orange Bowl alone. He rewatched the game in full after he accepted the Clemson job.

“They actually played pretty good defense when Coach Steele was there — real good at times. Dominant at times,” Venables said. “It was just some differences in opinions and it was probably a mutual thing — philosophies and things like that. It was just time. Obviously, I benefitted in so many ways, so many levels because of that.”

It didn’t take long for Venables to turn Clemson’s defense around, and in 2014, the Tigers had the nation’s best unit.

Three seasons later, the Tigers earned their first College Football Playoff berth and competed for a national title. From 2015 to 2020, Clemson competed in every Playoff and won two national championships.

“It was a wake-up call for the program and especially the guys on defense. You hate for your defensive coordinator to get fired, especially feeling like you were the reason he got fired,” Brewer said. “But it was just a crazy year.”

Clemson went 11-2 in 2012, with the most defining win of the season coming against LSU in the Chick-fil-A Bowl, 25-24. A win against Iowa State in next week’s Cheez-It Bowl would deliver Clemson its 11th consecutive season with double-digit wins.

“A lot of people want to say the LSU game was kind of the jumping point,” Mac Lain said. “This ass whipping was the jumping point. That’s what changed everything.”

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photo: Mike Ehrmann / Getty Images)