‘We had no sense this was coming’: Inside the Pac-12’s four-team expansion
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Kyle Bonagura, ESPN Staff Writer
LATE WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, Pac-12 commissioner Teresa Gould touched down at Los Angeles International Airport after a chaotic few days. For months, she had worked to help the league’s remaining two schools — Oregon State and Washington State — position themselves for the future, and things were finally falling into place.
When she arrived at baggage claim, Gould received confirmation via email that the Pac-12 board had unanimously approved official applications for conference membership from Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State and San Diego State, which had been submitted earlier in the day.
For the 35-year collegiate sports veteran and someone who had spent the bulk of the past 25 years affiliated with the Pac-12, it was hard to contain her excitement. Since stepping into the role in February, it was not always clear whether the conference had a future, and this ensured it would.
“We have a real opportunity to write a new story for the future and the new Pac-12,” Gould told ESPN the next day.
The Pac-12’s expansion efforts had been going on for weeks, but it wasn’t until early last week that all parties felt confident the moves were going to happen. By that point, the general framework of the new-look conference was agreed upon, and it became a matter of hammering out the details.
With university presidents and legal teams involved, the four Mountain West athletic directors remained in constant contact.
“Those conversations were being had multiple times a day, morning, noon and night,” Boise State athletic director Jeramiah Dickey said. “We were together in terms of jumping on calls and just talking through the what-if scenarios and potential opportunities that could exist and concerns and those type of things.”
Any concerns were outweighed by the potential of building something new. These schools had invested in their athletic department and football programs for years in preparation for this kind of opportunity, and while this wasn’t the same as joining the Pac-12 before its collapse, they strongly felt this move offered a better future than what they had in the Mountain West.
Those athletic directors’ counterparts around the conference were left in the dark, and when the news leaked late Wednesday night, several administrators at other Mountain West schools were caught off guard.
“There were some things after the fact that became more clear,” one Mountain West school administrator told ESPN. “Like certain people from those four schools not being present at meetings or generally unresponsive. It makes sense now, but we had no sense this was coming.”
For over a year, Oregon State and Washington State operated in the wilderness without a clear picture of what was ahead. During that time, they battled the departing schools — and absentee commissioner George Kliavkoff — in court for the Pac-12 assets and operational control. They chased television deals on their own, came to a scheduling agreement with the Mountain West in football, joined the West Coast Conference as affiliate members in other sports for two years and saw major leadership changes at the conference and institutional levels, with Gould replacing Kliavkoff and Anne McCoy replacing Pat Chun as the athletic director at WSU in March. Pac-12 staffing shrunk from about 190 at its peak to a skeleton crew of just over 30.
ESPN spoke with nearly two dozen sources familiar with the process to reveal how the Pac-12 emerged from that uncertainty and what comes next.
ON THE EVENING of July 10, at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, the Pac-12 hosted an event called “After Hours with the Beavs & Cougs.” The room was down the hall from where the United States men’s Olympic basketball team was headquartered in advance of the Paris games, and the hotel was also the designated media lodging for the Big 12 media days that wrapped up earlier in the day.
With only two schools, it didn’t make sense to hold a full-fledged media day. But with so many media members and others in the college athletics industry already in Vegas, the conference saw a chance to create some buzz with a more intimate gathering. The two head football coaches, OSU’s Trent Bray and WSU’s Jake Dickert, made the rounds. As did the two mascots, Benny and Butch. In the wake of the conference’s collapse the previous summer, though, there was also a somber tone.
After around 45 minutes of mingling, Gould addressed the room of about 100 people.
“This is supposed to be a fun night, and that’s why it looks different, it feels different,” she said. “We want you all to let your hair down and have a good time. … We have a bar in the back. Yes, we are drinking tonight during this event, and I would venture to say that if anyone has earned the right to drink, it’s the Pac-12.”
Always a great time After Dark 😏
More to come from tonight’s After Hours with the Beavs & Cougs! pic.twitter.com/JAc8Xd7W4g
— Pac-12 Conference (@pac12) July 11, 2024
The line killed, but no one left the Bellagio that night with a better understanding about what the future looked like. If anything, there was a growing sense in Las Vegas that OSU and WSU were being backed into the Mountain West and Gould’s role would be to spend the next two years tending to the dying embers of a conference with over a century of history.
If the Pac-12 were to survive, multiple industry sources presumed to ESPN at the time, it would likely have to come through a so-called reverse merger with the Mountain West. In that scenario, the Mountain West would have added OSU and WSU, continued to be operated by its current leadership — including commissioner Gloria Nevarez — and adopt the Pac-12 branding. That was never the preferred outcome of OSU and WSU, however, and over the past two months, Gould — as she was tasked to do when she was hired in February — worked to secure an outcome more favorable for the two schools.
On the same day the Pac-12 held its “After Hours” event, Nevarez kicked off her conference’s media day across town at the Circa Resort and Casino with a state of the conference address. She spoke confidently about the future of the conference and its strength and positioning.
“In this environment, our mantra is to be proactive and strategic to best position ourselves to navigate the future of college athletics,” Nevarez said. “Certainly transformation has hit [college athletics] pretty big in the last couple of years, and more is on its way, no doubt.”
To that end, Nevarez touted a presidential initiative intended to help the conference in the era of college realignment: a process known as “threatcasting.” The conference retained the help of Brian David Johnson, whom Nevarez described as an “internationally renowned threatcaster.”
Johnson serves as the director of the Threatcasting Lab at Arizona State, which states it strives to “provide a wide range of organizations and institutions actionable models to not only comprehend these possible futures but to a means to identify, track, disrupt, mitigate and recover from them as well.”
“He worked with us to model all the different futures in and around the college athletic space,” Nevarez said. “He’s providing us signals and wavefinders so that we have early detection for the more dire outcomes.”
To industry veterans, though, the need to hire an expert to outline the biggest threat to the Mountain West was puzzling. Oregon State and Washington State had already spelled out in a lawsuit for control of the Pac-12 filed last year their desire to rebuild the conference, in part, with conference assets. No other scenario that could threaten the Mountain West was remotely more plausible.
The Mountain West, sources said, felt protected by its bylaws and a poaching fee included in a football scheduling agreement it signed with the Pac-12 in December. To leave the conference, a school is required to pay roughly $18 million with two years of notice and $36 million with a one-year notice. And if the Pac-12 accepted a Mountain West school as a new member, the Pac-12 would be required to pay a $10 million fee, with escalators of $500,000 more for each additional school. (The four-school fee for Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State and San Diego State is $43 million.)
When the conferences signed the scheduling agreement in early December that added six Mountain West opponents for OSU and WSU this season, the Mountain West was operating from a position of strength and required a $14 million payment from the Pac-12. OSU and WSU needed a quick solution to fill their 2024 football schedules, and they were still fighting an appeal from the 10 departing Pac-12 members of a superior court ruling that granted them control of the conference. Even if the departing schools’ appeal failed — which it later did — there wasn’t a great sense of what the remaining assets would be.
Even so, when the scheduling agreement was announced, it included an instructive comment from Oregon State athletic director Scott Barnes: “We are still focused on re-building the Pac-12.”
At the time, the idea that in less than a year the Pac-12 would be willing to pay roughly $115 million for one-third of the Mountain West seemed unrealistic. For Mountain West leadership, that remained the case in July.
“We have a mutual desire to extend that relationship [with the Pac-12], and we’re currently in discussions about year two,” Nevarez said in her address in Las Vegas. “But for the time being, we’re really excited about playing them.”
In an interview with ESPN the next day, Nevarez reaffirmed her belief that a deal to extend the scheduling agreement with the Pac-12 would get done. The contract included an Aug. 1 date to open a window in which the conferences could execute a second year, she said, adding she was hopeful they could come to an agreement before then.
“We just have to connect, sign some docs and go,” she said.
IN DECEMBER, WHEN the scheduling agreement was signed, Kliavkoff was still technically the commissioner of the Pac-12. He would remain in the role until February, but after Oregon and Washington walked away from a media rights deal he put together with Apple on Aug. 4 — ensuring the conference’s collapse — Kliavkoff was mostly checked out.
With Oregon and Washington headed to the Big Ten, Arizona, Arizona State and Utah quickly followed Colorado to the Big 12. A month later, California and Stanford completed a move to the ACC, leaving OSU and WSU behind.
“Not only did it go down to two, but it felt like we didn’t have leadership,” Barnes told ESPN last month. “So [former WSU athletic director] Pat Chun and myself felt like we were co-commissioners for several months until Teresa was hired. We just didn’t feel like we had the support.”
It went so far that Kliavkoff was named in the lawsuit the two schools filed against the Pac-12 for operational control.
“It felt like he paid more attention to the teams that were exiting and placating the teams exiting than the two that were remaining,” Barnes said. “Why? It’s beyond me. I don’t know, but we literally fought for ourselves and in certain instances [Kliavkoff] came to the table late, but right out of the gate, I feel very strongly that he was advocating behind the scenes or elsewhere for the teams that were leaving and that we were not seeing a leader that was stepping up and helping protect our future the way that I believe a capable leadership should.”
When Gould was elevated from deputy commissioner to replace Kliavkoff in February, Barnes felt they had someone who was genuinely invested in helping their cause. Unlike Kliavkoff, who had no background in college sports when he was named commissioner in July 2021, Gould had worked her way up the ranks over the past 35 years.
Before being hired as the conference’s deputy commissioner in 2018, Gould was the interim athletic director at UC Davis, spent 14 years in various roles in the athletic department at Cal and had another eight years prior at the West Coast Conference, where she was an associate commissioner.
“Yeah, it’s been refreshing,” Barnes said. “I feel like we know we have a partner that is looking out for our best interests and one that has the leadership capacity to execute on the things that we prioritize, and she has done a fabulous job and just her short few months that she’s been here.”
After Gould was hired, the schools’ goal of rebuilding the Pac-12 wasn’t the primary focus. Both schools felt they belonged in a power conference, with their peers of the past 100 years.
“When I got this job, I had a lot of people kind of in the background cheering me on going, ‘We can’t wait to see you rebuild the Pac-12,'” Gould told ESPN two weeks ago. “I’ve been in this league for 25 years. There’s certainly a lot of nostalgia around that idea, but that’s not what I was hired to do. What I was hired to do is figure out a future conference path for these two institutions that achieves the guiding principles we’ve agreed on.”
(The leadership structure changed again in March, when Chun left for rival Washington. He was replaced on an interim basis by McCoy, the school’s senior deputy AD, who was named to the job on a permanent basis in June.)
After OSU and WSU’s desire to join the Big 12 was firmly rebuffed, sources said, they gamed out possible scenarios that could come in the wake of various rulings in the four lawsuits related to Clemson and Florida State’s attempts to exit the ACC. None of those amounted to more than a gamble, and didn’t fit their timeline.
WHEN TALKS ABOUT extending the scheduling agreement started a few weeks after media day, little progress was made. The Mountain West overestimated how vulnerable the Pac-12 was from a negotiating position and asked for more than the $14 million it received last year, with the Pac-12 countering with less than half that.
“We just never could really seem to gain a lot of traction for year two so that everybody felt really good about it,” McCoy told ESPN at the Apple Cup on Saturday. “I think, and I can’t speak for the Mountain West, but I know from the Pac-12, in our perspective, it just seemed like we always were just so far apart in what we thought should happen.”
Unlike when the initial deal was signed with Kliavkoff in charge, OSU and WSU were now in control of the Pac-12 assets — they secured roughly $250 million when the departures were finalized — and had more time to make alternative scheduling plans for 2025. When it became clear the Sept. 1 deadline to extend the agreement would pass, the Pac-12 became more serious about attempting a true rebuild.
Much of the vetting of potential candidates and outreach was handled by Navigate, a private sports consulting firm, sources said. The Pac-12 would be willing to help fund the exit fees, the schools were told, which took away the primary risk factor. Had the four been required to come up with a combined $72 million on their own, it would have been much more difficult to justify the jump — especially without a firm understanding of what kind of media deal the new-look conference could command.
The schools also knew to expect the Mountain West to attempt to withhold media rights distributions for departing schools over the next two years — roughly $5 million per school, per year — as it did when BYU, TCU and Utah all left in 2011. It’s unclear what the total cost will be to the schools and Pac-12 to the Mountain West when the dust settles.
“There is a lot of negotiation that still needs to happen between the Pac-12 and the Mountain West and among the various schools on what that exit is going to look like, what scheduling alliances are going to look like and all sorts of different details,” Colorado State president Amy Parsons said. “We have some time on that. We’re playing out the Mountain West all of next year and into the following. We will not have those details pinned down for some time.
“We are grateful to the Pac-12 that they’re investing in the four schools who are leaving the Mountain West in a way that makes us feel comfortable that we’re going to come out strong and ready to really compete at that level. But a lot of details [to get figured out] going forward.”
For years, the teams at the top of the Mountain West in terms of investment had grown tired of the bottom third’s inability to keep up, which contributed to the appeal of this model as opposed to adding OSU and WSU to the Mountain West, sources said.
Another theory that had been floating around since last year is the possibility that nine Mountain West schools could vote to dissolve the conference, freeing them up to move to the Pac-12 together without being required to pay exit fees. It was a possibility that received some informal discussion, a source said, but it never progressed to the point where anyone seriously considered pushing for it.
Once the Pac-12 fully committed to the rebuild, things moved quickly. Last Monday, there was a growing sentiment among stakeholders on both sides that it was likely to happen, and by Tuesday it was nearly a done deal. On Wednesday, the four schools all formally applied for membership, which required approval of the four-person Pac-12 board — made up of the presidents and athletic directors at OSU and WSU.
Nevarez caught wind of the possibility early last week, sources said, but the departing schools did not communicate their intention to leave before the deals were done.
With six schools, the Pac-12 still has to add at least two more by July 1, 2026, and there is not a firm timeline for when those additions will be made.
“I would like to move as swiftly as we can,” Barnes said. “Sort of the old John Wooden adage, ‘Be quick, but don’t hurry,’ in that regard. We don’t have any limitations on who we may visit with and we’ll move as quickly and thoroughly as we can. On the other side of that certainly is a chance to go out to market for a new media deal.”
The conference is expected to explore options in the American Athletic Conference — namely Tulane and Memphis — but it’s too early to say what the true appetite will be. Without a significant increase in their current media deal — AAC schools receive about $7 million annually — it becomes tougher to justify the added logistical hurdles of playing in a conference with a larger footprint, especially as a geographic outlier.
There is a good chance additional Mountain West schools could eventually find their way to the Pac-12. UNLV, for example, was a surprising omission this round for many industry sources given its relatively similar profile to the four departing schools, but the conference was steadfast in starting with this group.
“I can’t say I’m surprised [UNLV was not included] because I was pleased with the configuration, and actually the metrics and the metrics spoke to the decision-making process, and I and they were very, very objective in that sense,” San Diego State president Adela de la Torre said. “So in my mind, I think it was the best four that were selected.”
TWO DAYS AFTER the announcement, Washington State capped off the week with a victory in the Apple Cup against Washington at Lumen Field in Seattle. The Cougars’ goal-stand with 1:12 left to preserve the 24-19 win ignited a memorable celebration that started in the field and carried into the locker room and, for coach Jake Dickert, the postgame news conference.
To Dickert, the conference news was a welcome development, but what happens next, he said, is more important.
“This is the critical point for Washington State athletics right now. What are we going to do to invest in the future?” he said. “We let some new teams in, we have an opportunity to stay ahead of the curve to compete for championships if we want to invest, right?
“I don’t get my check from Washington State athletics. I get it from Washington State University. The university needs to invest in the athletics program and this football team every step of the way. That’s exactly what it’s going to take and you’re going to see more days just like this, but where we’re currently at is not enough so we’re putting in a big picture. If you can’t be proud of what the Cougs are doing right now, I can’t really help you.”
It’s a similar perspective at the conference level in that the developments from last week are important, but only foundational in nature.
“The outreach and the outpouring of people that are not only cheering us on saying, ‘This is awesome, we’re so excited about this,’ has been really significant,” Gould said. “And I think it just supports what I already knew, which is that people really care about the Pac-12 and about the brand and about it continuing long into the future.”
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David Hale
CLEMSON, S.C. — Dabo Swinney has a knack for finding a silver lining. It has been his defining trait over the past five seasons, as Clemson has hovered near the top of the ACC, but frustratingly far from the run of dominance it enjoyed in the 2010s. In a loss, Swinney found lessons. Even after a blowout, he saw hope. Even in the midst of fan revolt, he found all the evidence he needed of an inevitable turnaround within his own locker room.
Perhaps that’s what’s most jarring about Clemson’s most recent bout with mediocrity. It’s not just that the Tigers, the prohibitive favorite in the ACC to open the season, are 1-3 heading into Saturday’s showdown with equally disappointing and 2-2 North Carolina (noon ET, ESPN), but that Swinney’s usual optimism has been tinged with his own frustration.
“It’s just an absolute coaching failure,” Swinney said. “I don’t know another way to say it. And I’m not pointing the finger, I’m pointing the thumb. It starts with me, because I hired everybody, and I empower everybody and equip everybody.”
Record aside, Clemson has been here before — after slow starts in 2021, 2022, 2023 and last year’s blowout at the hands of Georgia to open the season. And yet, at each of those turns, Swinney remained his program’s biggest salesman.
Now, after the Tigers’ worst start since 2004, not even Swinney is immune to the reality. The questions are bigger, the stakes are higher and the solutions are more ephemeral.
In the aftermath of an emphatic loss to Syracuse in Death Valley two weeks ago, ESPN social posted the historic upset in bold type. The response from former Clemson defensive end Xavier Thomas echoed the frustration so many inside the Tigers’ once impenetrable inner sanctum are feeling.
“At this point,” Thomas replied, “it’s not even an upset anymore.”
Two months remain of a seemingly lost season. There is a path for Clemson to rebound, as it has before, and finish with a respectable, albeit disappointing, record. But there is another road, too — one hardly imagined by anyone inside the program just weeks ago. A road that leads to the end of a dynasty.
“He’s definitely bought himself some time to be able to have some hiccups along the way,” former Clemson receiver Hunter Renfrow said. “He’s an unbelievable coach and leader, and he’ll get it figured out.”
FORMER CLEMSON RUNNING back and now podcaster Darien Rencher banked a cache of interviews with star players during fall camp that he planned to release as the season progressed. Most have been evergreen. At the time he talked with Clemson quarterback Cade Klubnik, that one did, too. Looking back, it feels more like a time capsule, one that can’t be unearthed without a full autopsy of what has unfolded since.
“A month and a half ago, we’re talking about him being a front-runner for the Heisman, a top-five draft pick,” Rencher said. “I mean — my gosh.”
Any unspooling of what has gone wrong at Clemson must start with the quarterback.
Klubnik’s career followed a pretty straight trend — a rocky rookie season primarily as the backup to a sophomore campaign filled with growing pains to a coming-out party last season that ended with 336 passing yards and three touchdowns in a playoff loss to Texas. The obvious next step was into the echelon of elite QBs — not just nationally, but within the pantheon of Clemson’s best, alongside Deshaun Watson and Trevor Lawrence.
Instead, Klubnik has looked lost.
“It can’t be physical unless he’s got the yips, which maybe he does,” former Clemson offensive lineman and current ACC Network analyst Eric Mac Lain said. “It’s bad sometimes. You’ve got guys screaming wide-open, and he’s looking at them, and the ball’s just not coming out. That’s the unexplainable thing.”
Through four games, Klubnik has nearly as many passing touchdowns (six) as he does interceptions (four).
There are, however, more than a few folks around the program who believe they can explain the struggles — for Klubnik and other stars who underwhelmed in September.
“We don’t got no dogs at Clemson,” former All-America defensive end Shaq Lawson posted in early September. “NIL has changed everything.”
It’s telling that even Swinney also has been vocal in his critique of Klubnik.
“It’s routine stuff. Basic, not complicated, like just simple reads, simple progression,” Swinney said of Klubnik’s play in Week 1, a performance that has been mirrored in subsequent games. “Holding the ball and running out of the pocket. Just didn’t play well, and so I didn’t have to talk to him. He already knew. He knows the game.”
This is a different era of college football, and while Swinney often sought a measure of patience with his players before, Klubnik is, by most reports, the second-highest-paid person inside the football building after Swinney, so the expectations have changed.
“If [Klubnik] ain’t a dude, we ain’t winning,” Swinney said after the loss to LSU in Week 1. “Dudes got to be dudes. This is big boy football.”
That massive NIL paydays and equally immense hype might underpin Klubnik’s struggles is not without anecdotal evidence. Look around the country and there are plenty of others — Florida‘s DJ Lagway, Texas‘ Arch Manning, UCLA‘s Nico Iamaleava, South Carolina‘s LaNorris Sellers and LSU’s Garrett Nussmeier — who’ve endured rough starts to seasons that were supposed to be star turns.
And yet, for Klubnik, this feels like a hollow excuse. He is, according to numerous coaches and teammates, unflinchingly competitive and talented. If anything, the knock on Klubnik the past few years has been his eagerness to play the role of hero, to do too much.
Perhaps the bigger impact of NIL on Klubnik’s performance comes in how far he has been from earning the paycheck. The millions could be an excuse to relax or a burden to live up to, and Klubnik’s tape through four games shows a QB scrambling to look the part rather than simply playing the game as he always has.
“It’s a tough sport and a team sport. There’s no perfect quarterback,” Klubnik said. “For me, I’m not paying attention to how other quarterbacks are playing, but I’m competitive whether we’re good or not, and I’m going to fight to the very end. I feel like the tape shows that, but you ask anybody in this facility about who I am and who this team is, we’re going to fight and we’re not going anywhere.”
SWINNEY HAS OFTEN bristled at outright criticism of his own performance, like his tirade in response to one apoplectic Clemson fan — Tyler from Spartanburg — who called into Swinney’s radio show after a 4-4 start to the 2023 season demanding change. Swinney’s rant was largely credited as inspiring a five-game winning streak to end the year, an emphatic rebuke to those ready to write his epitaph.
“He’s done it his way,” Renfrow said of Swinney. “And he’s built a really good roster. Three months ago, everyone was crowning us as the best team to play this year.”
The narrative has quickly changed, and Swinney isn’t arguing.
“Everybody can start throwing mud now,” Swinney said even before this latest round of mudslinging began in earnest. “Bring it on, say we suck again. Tell everybody we suck. Coaches suck, Cade stinks. Start writing that again.”
During Clemson’s past four seasons — years of 10, 10, nine and 10 wins — the underlying narrative was that the Tigers remained good, but they were slowly falling behind the competition due to Swinney’s stubborn insistence on remaining old-school. He was tagged as reluctant to embrace the NIL era due to comments he made in 2014, seven years before NIL began (though Clemson was heavily invested in its players via its collective at the time), and for multiple seasons, he refused to deal in the portal, retaining the vast majority of his recruited talent but adding nothing in the portal until this offseason.
And yet, Swinney has evolved — even if a bit more gradually than most coaches.
“One of the lazy takes on Swinney is he hasn’t changed,” Rencher said. “He did what he needed to do to give them a chance. He went and got the best offensive coordinator [Garrett Riley] in the country to come to Clemson. He got one of the most renowned defensive coordinators [Tom Allen] in the country who was just in the playoffs to come to Clemson. He went in the portal and got a stud D-end [in Will Heldt]. He paid his guys, retained his roster. These guys got paid.”
Even amid the hefty criticism coming from former players, little has been directed at Swinney. They played for him, they know him, and they’re convinced he’s not the source of Clemson’s struggles.
The new coordinators — Riley was hired in 2023, and Allen was hired this offseason — and current players, however, are a different story.
“They want to win more than we do,” former edge rusher KJ Henry posted amid Clemson’s stunning loss against Syracuse.
The outpouring of frustration from former players — many, such as Henry, who endured a share of setbacks during Clemson’s more rocky stretch in the 2020s — has been notable.
Heldt said he has not paid much attention to outside criticism, but he understands it.
“They’ve earned the right,” Heldt said. “They put in the time and have earned the right to say how they feel, but I don’t put too much thought into that.”
If the commentary hasn’t seeped into the locker room, the message still seems clear.
Swinney’s scathing review of the coaching staff — himself included — this week was evidence that the whole culture is off. Swinney was lambasted for years for an insular approach to building a staff, hiring mostly former Clemson players and promoting from within, but those hires at least maintained a culture that had driven championships. But now, the disjointed play and lack of any obvious identity on both sides of the ball has made Riley and Allen feel more like mercenaries than saviors, and the result is a sum that is less than its individual parts.
Riley’s playcalling has been questioned relentlessly. In the second half against LSU, with Clemson either ahead or within a score, the Tigers virtually abandoned the run game entirely.
Allen was brought in to toughen up a defense that was scorched last season by Louisville, SMU, Texas and, in the most embarrassing performance of the season, by Sellers and rival South Carolina. And yet, with NFL talent such as Heldt, Peter Woods and T.J. Parker on the defensive line, Syracuse owned the line of scrimmage in its Week 4 win in Death Valley.
Meanwhile promising recruits such as T.J. Moore and Gideon Davidson have yet to look ready for the big time, and the transfer additions beyond Heldt — Tristan Smith and Jeremiah Alexander — have offered virtually nothing.
Start making a list of all the things that have gone wrong, and the frustration is apparent.
“Dropped balls, Cade misses a guy, the offensive line gets beat, Cade has PTSD and rolls out when he shouldn’t — it’s just all these things,” Rencher said. “You can blame a lot of things but it’s just too much wrong to where it can’t be right. It’s too many things everywhere so it can’t come together. You can overcome some things, but they’re just all not on the same page.”
BEFORE HIS GAME against Clemson, which Georgia Tech ultimately won on a last-second field goal, Yellow Jackets coach Brent Key set the stage for what he knew would be a battle, despite the Tigers’ rocky start.
“No one’s better at playing the underdog than Dabo,” Key said.
Swinney has resurrected his teams again and again, swatted away the critics, stayed true to his core philosophies and emerged victorious — if not a national champion.
So, is this year really different? Has Clemson lost its edge? Has Swinney lost his magic?
“I see an extremely talented team,” Syracuse defensive coordinator Elijah Robinson said. “Those guys are dangerous. I don’t care what their record is. That’s not just a team, that’s a program. Dabo Swinney does a great job, and they went out and lost the first game last year and went on to win the conference. A lot of these kids, when I was at Texas A&M, we tried to recruit them. People can think what they want when they look at the record. I’m not looking at the record at all.”
Added another assistant coach who faced Clemson this season: “It wouldn’t surprise me if they run the table the rest of the way.”
Winning out would still get Clemson to 10 wins, a mark that has been the standard under Swinney. Winning out would likely shift all the criticism of September into another offseason of promise, such as the one Clemson just enjoyed. Winning out is still possible, according to the players there who’ve said a deep breath during an off week has been a chance to reset and start anew.
“The college football landscape has changed so much over the last 10 years,” Renfrow said. “But developing, teaching, coaching, bringing people together — that hasn’t, and Swinney’s as good as I’ve been around at those things.”
That’s largely the lesson Florida State head coach Mike Norvell took from his team’s miserable 2-10 performance a year ago. In the face of a landslide of change and criticism, the key is doubling down on the beliefs that made a coach successful to begin with, not a host of changes intended to appease the masses.
“The dynamic of college football and being a part of a team and the pressures that are within an organization now are greater than they’ve ever been,” Norvell said. “You put money into the equation, and you have all the agents and people surrounding these kids, when things don’t go as expected, you’ve got to really stay true to who you are and make sure you’re connected with these guys at their needs. The example we had last year, we didn’t do a great job at that because as the tidal wave of challenges showed up, it’s critical to refocus and revamp the guys for what they can do. It’s not fun to go through, but I think you’ll continue to see more and more.”
The game has changed, and Clemson, for all of Swinney’s steadfast resolve, has been swept along with the currents.
There’s a legacy at Clemson, one it helped build, and for all its faith in Swinney’s process, it’s not hard to see the cracks in the façade.
Never mind the record, Rencher said. Maintaining the Clemson standard is what’s at stake now.
“That, more than any loss, would be the most disappointing thing, if they didn’t respond,” Rencher said. “Swinney’s optimistic. They’re built to last. He said they’re going to use all these things people are throwing at us to build more championships, and I believe him. Clemson is built on belief and responding the right way. It would be unlike Clemson to not respond. That would be so much more disappointing than going 1-3 if we just laid down. If this is the class that just lays down, I can’t imagine that.”
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Alden Gonzalez
WHEN THE LOW point arrived last year, on Sept. 15 in Atlanta, Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts broke character and challenged some of his players in a meeting many of them later identified as a fulcrum in their championship run.
This year, he attempted to strike a more positive tone.
It was Sept. 6. The Dodgers had just been walked off in Baltimore, immediately after being swept in Pittsburgh, and though they were still 15 games above .500, a sense of uneasiness lingered. Their division lead was slim, consistency remained elusive and spirits were noticeably down. Roberts saw an opportunity to take stock.
“He was talking to us about the importance of what was in front of us,” Dodgers infielder Miguel Rojas said in Spanish. “At that time, there were like seven, eight weeks left because we only had three weeks left in the regular season, and he wanted all of us, collectively, to think about what we were still capable of doing, and the opportunity we still had to win another championship.”
Later that night, Yoshinobu Yamamoto got within an out of no-hitting the Baltimore Orioles, then he surrendered a home run to Jackson Holliday and watched the bullpen implode after his exit, allowing three additional runs in what became the Dodgers’ most demoralizing loss of the season. The next morning, though, music blared inside Camden Yards’ visiting clubhouse. Players were upbeat, vibes were positive.
The Dodgers won behind an effective Clayton Kershaw later that afternoon, then reeled off 16 wins over their next 21 games — including back-to-back emphatic victories over the Cincinnati Reds in the first round of the playoffs.
It took a day, but Roberts’ message had seemingly landed.
“We needed some positivity,” Dodgers outfielder Teoscar Hernandez said, “to remove all of the negativity that we were feeling in that moment.”
As they approach a highly anticipated National League Division Series against the Philadelphia Phillies, the Dodgers once again look like one of the deepest, most fearsome teams in the sport.
But the journey there was arduous.
A Dodgers team many outsiders pegged as a candidate to break the regular-season-wins record of 116 ultimately won only 93, its fewest total in seven years. Defending a championship, a task no team has successfully pulled off in a quarter-century, has proven to be a lot more difficult than many Dodger players anticipated. But they’ve maintained a belief that their best selves would arrive when it mattered most. And whether it’s a product of health, focus, or because the right message hit them at the right time, they believe it’s here now.
“We’re coming together at the right time,” Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy said amid a champagne-soaked celebration Wednesday night, “and that’s all that really matters.”
BUSTER POSEY’S San Francisco Giants became the most dominant team in the first half of the 2010s, during which they captured three championships. They won every other year — on even years, famously — but could not pull off the repeat the Dodgers are chasing. To this day, Posey, now the Giants’ president of baseball operations, can’t pinpoint why.
“I wish I could,” Posey said, “because if I knew what that one thing was, I would’ve tried to correct it the second, third time through.”
Major League Baseball has not had a repeat champion since the New York Yankees won their third consecutive title in 2000, a 24-year drought that stands as the longest ever among the four major North American professional sports, according to ESPN Research. In that span, the NBA had a team win back-to-back championships on four different occasions. The NHL? Three. The NFL, whose playoff rounds all consist of one game? Two.
MLB’s drought has occurred in its wild-card era, which began in 1995 and has expanded since.
“The baseball playoffs are really difficult,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said. “You obviously have to be really good. You also have to have some really good fortune. The number of rounds and the fact that the very best team in the league wins around 60% of their games, the very worst team wins around 40% — now you take the upper-echelon in the playoffs, and the way baseball games can play out, good fortune is a real part of determining the outcomes.”
The Dodgers, now 11 wins shy of a second consecutive title, will hope for some of that good fortune this month. They’ve already encountered some of the pitfalls that come with winning a championship, including the one Posey experienced most vividly: the toll of playing deep into October.
“That month of postseason baseball — it’s more like two or three months of regular-season baseball, just because of the intensity of it,” Posey said.
The Dodgers played through Oct. 30 last year — and then they began this season March 18, nine days before almost everybody else, 5,500 miles away in Tokyo.
“At the time, you don’t see it,” Hernández said, “but when the next season starts, that’s when you start feeling your body not responding the way it should be. And it’s because you don’t get as much time to get ready, to prepare for next season. This one has been so hard, I got to be honest, because — we win last year, and we don’t even have the little extra time that everybody gets because we have to go to Japan. So, you have to push yourself to get ready a month early so you can be ready for those games. Those are games that count for the season. So, working hard when your body is not even close to 100%, I think that’s the reason. I think that’s why you see, after a team wins, next year you see a lot of players getting hurt.”
The Dodgers had the second-most amount of money from player salaries on the injured list this season, behind only the Yankees, the team they defeated in the World Series, according to Spotrac. The Dodgers sent an NL-leading 29 players to the IL, a list that included Freddie Freeman, who underwent offseason surgery on the injured ankle he played through last October, and several other members of their starting lineup — Will Smith, Max Muncy, Tommy Edman and Hernández.
The bullpen that carried the Dodgers through last fall might have paid the heaviest price. Several of those who played a prominent role last October — Blake Treinen, Michael Kopech, Evan Phillips — either struggled, were hurt or did not pitch. It might not have been the sole reason for the bullpen’s struggles — a combined 4.94 ERA from free agent signees Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates played just as big a role — but it certainly didn’t help.
“I don’t know if there’s any carryover thing,” Treinen said Sept. 16 after suffering his third consecutive loss. “I don’t believe in that. We just have a job, and it’s been weird.”
IN FEBRUARY, ROJAS made headlines by saying that the 2025 Dodgers could challenge the wins record and added they might win 120 games at full health. An 8-0 start — after an offseason in which the front office added Blake Snell, Roki Sasaki, Michael Conforto, Hyeseong Kim, Scott and Yates to what was arguably the sport’s best roster already — only ratcheted up the expectations.
The Dodgers managed a 53-32 record through the end of June — but then, they went 10-14 in July, dropped seven of their first 12 games in August and saw a seven-game lead in the National League West turn into a one-game deficit.
From July 1 to Aug. 14, the Dodgers’ offense ranked 20th in OPS and 24th in runs per game. The rotation began to round into form, but the bullpen sported the majors’ highest walk rate and put up a 1.43 WHIP in that stretch, fifth highest.
The Dodgers swept the San Diego Padres at home in mid-August, regaining some control of the division, but then Los Angeles split a series against the last-place Colorado Rockies and lost one in San Diego. The Dodgers swept the Reds, then lost two of three to the Arizona Diamondbacks, dropped three in a row to the Pirates and suffered those back-to-back walk-off losses to the Orioles.
Consistency eluded the Dodgers at a time when it felt as if every opponent was aiming for them.
Before rejoining the Dodgers ahead of the 2023 season, Rojas spent eight years with the Miami Marlins, who were continually out of the playoff race in September and found extra motivation when facing the best teams down the stretch. Those matchups functioned as their World Series.
“I think that’s the problem for those teams after winning a World Series — you’re going to have a target on your back,” Rojas said. “And it’s going to take a lot of effort for your main guys to step up every single day. And then, at the end of the regular season, you’re going to be kind of exhausted from the battle of every single day. And I think that’s why when teams get to the playoffs, they probably fall short.”
Travis d’Arnaud, now a catcher for the Los Angeles Angels, felt the same way while playing for the defending-champion Atlanta Braves in 2022. There was “a little bit more emotion” in games that otherwise didn’t mean much, he said. Teams seemed to bunt more frequently, play their infield in early and consistently line up their best relievers. Often, they’d face a starting pitcher who typically threw in the low-90s but suddenly started firing mid- to upper-90s fastballs.
“It’s just a different intensity,” said A.J. Pierzynski, the catcher for the Chicago White Sox teams that won it all in 2005 and failed to repeat in 2006. “It’s hard to quantify unless you’re playing in the games, but there’s a different intensity if you’re playing.”
BEFORE A SEASON-ENDING sweep of the Seattle Mariners, the 2025 Dodgers were dangerously close to finishing with the fewest full-season wins total of any team Friedman has overseen in these past 11 years. Friedman acknowledged that recently but added a caveat: “I’d also say that going into October, I think it’ll be the most talented team.”
It’s a belief that has fueled the Dodgers.
With Snell and Glasnow healthy, Yamamoto dialing up what was already an NL Cy Young-caliber season and Shohei Ohtani fully stretched out, the Dodgers went into the playoffs believing their rotation could carry them the way their bullpen did a year earlier. Their confidence was validated immediately. Snell allowed two baserunners through the first six innings of Game 1 of the wild-card round Tuesday night, and Yamamoto went 6⅔ innings without allowing an earned run 24 hours later.
“For us, it’s going to be our starting pitching,” Muncy said. “They’re going to set the tone.”
But an offense that has been without Smith, currently nursing a hairline fracture in his right hand, has also been clicking for a while. The Dodgers trailed only the Phillies in slugging percentage over the last three weeks of the regular season. In the Dodgers’ first two playoff games, 10 players combined to produce 28 hits. Six of them came from Mookie Betts, who began the season with an illness that caused him to lose close to 20 pounds and held a .670 OPS — 24 points below the league average — as recently as Aug. 6. Since then, he’s slashing .326/.384/.529.
His trajectory has resembled that of his team.
“We had a lot of struggles, really all year,” Betts said. “But I think we all view that as just a test to see how we would respond. And so now we’re starting to use those tests that we went through earlier to respond now and be ready now. And anything that comes our way, it can’t be worse than what we’ve already gone through.”
The Dodgers still don’t know if their bullpen will be good enough to take them through October — though Sasaki’s ninth inning Wednesday night, when he flummoxed the Reds with triple-digit fastballs and devastating splitters, certainly provided some hope — but they believe in their collective ability to navigate it.
They believe this roster is better and deeper than the championship-winning one from last fall. And, as Rojas said, they believe they “know how to flip the switch when it matters most.”
“It’s been a long year,” Muncy said. “At this point, seven months ago, we were on the other side of the world. We’ve been through a lot this year, and to end up in the spot we’re in right now — we’re in a great spot. We’re in the postseason. That’s all that matters. That’s what we’ve been saying all year. Anything can happen once you’re in October.”
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