CLEMSON, S.C. — If you cut Ben Boulware, Clemson’s wild child linebacker, does he not bleed? If you outlast him in a national championship game, does he not cry?
Unashamedly, he’ll tell you, yes, that 347 days ago, upon leaving the same field to which the Tigers return next week to play a semi-big one against Ohio State, he was a weepy mess. Like he had just binge-watched the Hallmark Channel all weekend.
Not really a state he wishes to revisit.
“When I walk in that stadium (University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz.), I want to make sure I do everything in my power to walk out of that stadium not crying my eyes out,” he said. “I won’t be focused on last year. But probably those first couple snaps, I’ll be making sure I embrace it, make sure the outcome turns out the way we want it to this year.”
Really. You, the linebacker who has been vilified in Louisville and Boston for being, shall we say, overly-enthusiastic with their quarterbacks, cried? You spring a leak often, big fella?
“I don’t cry a lot,” he said. “I cried when I was little, when my older brother and cousins would beat me up. I was a crybaby when I was little. You lose a national championship game, it takes a toll on you. I cried like a little baby.
“I’m still not over it. I’m still (angry) about it. It kind of fuels us, leaves a little bigger chip on our shoulder, to get so far last year and at the end of the day we didn’t finish.”
Clemson returns to the big stage in the desert on New Year’s Eve for the Fiesta Bowl national championship semifinal against the Buckeyes. That’s the site where last season it went all Hagler-Hearns with Alabama for the national title, trading big shots in a game the Tigers could/should have won but instead lost 45-40.
THE Ohio State enters with a mighty reputation and an all-caps sense of its own importance. But THE Clemson comes in the early three-point favorite and with a more recent taste for what this college football playoff is all about.
The Tigers will have a unique déjà view on the proceedings, going back to the very place it lost such a breathless playoff just a year ago. How this will prepare them/affect them against Ohio State is one of the intangible variables of the semifinal.
Any flashbacks are likely to be unpleasant.
“We haven’t reflected on it too much but it’s always in the back of our minds that we got there and lost,” defensive tackle Carlos Watkins said. “It was a sick feeling. Taking nothing away from Alabama, but we actually had that game. We were a few plays away from winning that game. That’s the thing that’s tough, knowing you had a chance to win. It’s fuel to the fire.
“I’ll have some flashbacks, it will probably motivate me more than anything. Looking back I can’t let this opportunity slip by again.”
Experience is hardly ever a bad thing and that is an advantage the Tigers have acquired in abundance.
A year ago, Suwanee’s Mitch Hyatt was a callow freshman thrown into starting at left tackle and doing quite well with the assignment. Like freshman All-American well.
He likened last season to a kid’s first year in high school, a dizzying, slightly disorienting experience that seemed to move faster than the speed of life. But now he fully knows his way around these particular hallways.
“It’s a lot nicer knowing,” he said.
“I have a lot better understanding of the game and have a much better view of this season as a whole.”
His associate on the line, senior center Jay Guillermo, had a sense last season that players were distracted by the building frenzy around Clemson. Even if their play didn’t always show it, they went a little big-game blind.
Ah, but this time, “Guys have been there, they know what it takes to get there. They know things they need to focus on and the team needs to focus on,” Guillermo said. “It’s like everything in life you get experience in, it’s a little easier the second time.”
“The stage is not going to overwhelm me,” Grayson’s Ryan Carter, a junior Clemson cornerback, said.
The fact that the Tigers are going directly back to the scene of last season’s national championship is a reminder to them and everyone else that Clemson truly is playing with the big boys now. And with that comes a certain big-boy approach.
Said Gainesville’s Deshaun Watson, the quarterback who has empowered much of Clemson’s ambitious reach, “Our goal this year is to not just get to the final four, we want to finish the deal.”
On order, waiting at will-call at another stadium, this one in Tampa, are some tears of joy.
About the Author
