ESPN put three Clemson College Football Playoff games in its all-time Top 10, and if that number surprises you, you weren't paying attention between 2015 and 2020. The Tigers have made seven CFP appearances, the most recent in 2024 in the first 12-team field. Three of the ten best games the format ever produced came from one roster's worth of Januarys.
I don't have ESPN's exact three in front of me yet, but the candidates pick themselves, and that's the whole point. January 9, 2017, Tampa: Deshaun Watson finds Hunter Renfrow with one second on the clock, Clemson 35, Alabama 31, the national title changing hands on a two-yard slant. Two years later, a freshman quarterback named Trevor Lawrence took the same opponent apart 44 to 16 in Santa Clara, and the sport spent the next twelve months trying to figure out what it had just watched. In between, the 2018 Sugar Bowl semifinal against Alabama, the 2019 Fiesta Bowl comeback from 16 to nothing down against Ohio State that ended 29 to 23. Any three of those belong.
What gets lost in a list like this is how unusual that run was. The four-team era was famously a closed shop, the same handful of programs recycling the same brackets, and Clemson was one of the few that walked in and refused to be a guest. They lost the 2016 title game to Alabama 45 to 40 and came back and won the rematch. That's the tell of a real program. Not the trophy, the repeat visit.
The 2024 trip looked different. Twelve teams, a first-round road game, Texas 38, Clemson 24, and the Tigers were a participant rather than a threat. Expansion did that on purpose. More doors, thinner rooms.
What I'm watching next is whether anybody in the 12-team era ever produces three games worth arguing about the way that Clemson-Alabama cycle did. Bigger field, more chances, fewer rivalries with real scar tissue. Volume isn't the same as memory.