It was a bad day in the midst of a great journey for Clemson Football

Dabo Swinney explains how the loss in the 2012 Orange Bowl fueled the Tigers’ rise as one of college football’s elite programs

Caitie McMekin / USA TODAY NETWORK

DANIA BEACH, Fla. — When No. 7 Clemson lines up to play sixth-ranked Tennessee in the 89th annual Orange Bowl Classic, the Tigers will be playing for a seventh time in the prestigious bowl game.

Clemson has posted a 4-2 record in its previous six trips, including a 22-15 win over No. 4 Nebraska in the 1982 Orange Bowl. That night was a momentous moment in Clemson Football, as the Tigers clinched their first National Championship.

Thirty years later, Clemson finally returned to the Orange Bowl, and again it left an indelible moment in the annals of college football. West Virginia destroyed the Tigers that night in Miami Gardens, scoring an all-time bowl record 70 points.

When it was all said and done, the Mountaineers beat Clemson, 70-33.

“That was a pretty bad night,” Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney recalled during Thursday’s Coaches Press Conference to preview the 2022 Orange Bowl.

But as bad as it was, it was just what his program needed. Swinney used the humiliating loss as fuel, and in the years that followed the Tigers went from a “joke” to one of college football’s “elite” programs.

“It was just another step for us. I told them it will not be thirty years before we got back to the Orange Bowl,” Swinney said. “We were back two years later, and we beat a great Ohio State team.”

The Tigers took down the Buckeyes 40-35 in the 2014 Orange Bowl, and then came back and beat Oklahoma in the 2015 Orange Bowl Classic.

The win over the Sooners sent Clemson to the national championship game that year. Since their last trip to the Orange Bowl, the Tigers have played for the national title four times, won it twice and has made six College Football Playoff appearances, second only to Alabama’s seven.

“My job from that point (in 2012) was to make sure we get better in that moment and not lose sight of a great year,” Swinney said. “We won 10 games for the first time in twenty years, and it was thirty years since we had been to the Orange Bowl. So, our message to the team was we will get better. We will learn from this, and we will grow from this.

“We have to own it. It will be a long time until we play again. I wish we could have played the next week. But it was a part of our journey. That’s it.”

A journey that helped Clemson not win just a second national title, but a third one too.

“It was just a bad day in the midst of a great journey of Clemson Football. That is how I look at it,” he said.

How will Friday’s Orange Bowl fit into Clemson’s journey going forward. I guess we will soon find out.

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