A few days after Florida State shellacked his team, 51-14, in front of a sold-out and raucous Death Valley crowd, Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney soothed the lingering disappointment of the Tigers’ first loss by saying that his team is more even with the Seminoles than the score indicated.
Swinney watched film of the game and concluded on Tuesday that if the two teams played 10 times, “We’d probably win five, they’d probably win five.”
While being careful to take nothing away from FSU’s dominant performance, Swinney said that the Seminoles ‘were a bit ahead’ of Clemson and that they caught his Tigers on a bad night.
Just to remind everyone: Florida State ran up 565 yards of offense, notched 30 first downs, went 8-of-12 on third down conversions, held the ball 35 minutes, forced four turnovers and limited the Tigers offense to just 326 yards, 145 of them coming in garbage time.
This wasn’t a fluky performance. It was complete dominance over a quality team in a hostile environment.
Swinney just needs to let it go and move on before he starts to sound like the former Iraqi information minister.