The Clemson Dubcast

A few weeks before Clemson's 2003 baseball season began, a group of students sat in their apartment and one of the guys was skimming classified ads looking for interesting things for sale. He came across this ad: "Bus. $400 with spare engine." The idea was hatched to buy the bus and turn it into a tailgating machine. Twenty years later, the bus is a fixture beyond the right-field fence at Doug Kin...

J.C. Harper remembers growing up in Clemson as the son of iconic assistant coach Tom Harper, the architect of the Tigers' rampaging defensive lines in the 1980s. At Daniel High School, J.C. attracted attention from recruiters and Georgia's Vince Dooley began appearing at his games. After committing to the Bulldogs, J.C. braced himself for his father's reaction. "Son, did you commit to Georgia?" "Y...

Ron Green Jr. doesn't need an introduction to Michael Jordan. He covered Jordan as a writer for the student newspaper at North Carolina when Jordan was in Chapel Hill. Green has been around a long time -- long enough to have covered Danny Ford during Clemson's first golden era, to have developed a relationship with Tiger Woods, and to have played golf with Donald Trump long before Trump became Pre...

Ruffin McNeill is basically like family to Garrett Riley and Lincoln Riley, so with Dabo Swinney's major hire of TCU's former offensive coordinator McNeill had a lot to say about Garrett and his history with him. In the mid-1980s, McNeill got his start in college coaching as a grad assistant for Clemson under Danny Ford. He considers those years two of the most formative of his entire career coach...

Todd Dodge is firmly in the inner circle of Cade Klubnik, and the same is true of Jay Mathews and Christopher Vizzina. Dodge and Mathews were featured prominently in the recent series of articles at Tigerillustrated.com exploring the backgrounds of Clemson's two highly regarded quarterbacks. This podcast presents the raw audio from the interviews of those two figures, conducted in late December. D...

Fred Cunningham is an Upstate TV news institution who's been working in South Carolina since 1984, when he left his home state of Indiana and entered a whole new world. His first indoctrination into big-time college football was in Athens when Clemson visited Georgia for a major matchup in 1984. Kevin Butler won the game on a 60-yard field goal, and Cunningham walked away mesmerized by the experie...

  Mickey Plyler visits the podcast to try to make some sense of the current college football world from bowl opt-outs, to the transfer portal, to NIL, and to Clemson's dispiriting performance in the Orange Bowl against Tennessee. What to make of six losses for Clemson the past two years? Does it signal a significant decline worthy of Dabo Swinney making some changes, or are the Tigers on the way b...

We revisit this interview from November of 2018 with Clemson Hall of Fame member Wayne Coffman, an icon in athletics and academic support. Coffman talks his relationship with Dabo Swinney, the pressures of being an academic adviser for a high-profile sport, growing up in a household of 13 children, and how in the world he got the nickname "Cheech." Both of Coffman's parents passed away by the time...

In December of 2021, Tigerillustrated.com reported an in-depth series of articles on freshman quarterback Cade Klubnik as he prepared to arrive at Clemson from his home in Austin, Texas. In this podcast, we revisit the lengthy interviews we conducted then with Klubnik's mother Kim, his pastor Brad Thomas (a Clemson grad) and Klubnik himself. Klubnik has become a sensation again after replacing DJ...

Pete Iacobelli, an institution in South Carolina sports journalism after having spent three decades working for the Associated Press, joins the podcast to reminisce about all the people and stories he's covered. Iacobelli also weighs in on the more memorable public spats between coaches and media, including this week's dust-up between Shane Beamer and Post and Courier columnist Gene Sapakoff. Iaco...

Will Swinney, oldest son of Dabo Swinney, joins the podcast to reflect on life in the real world as he works for a Charlotte-based real-estate development company. This past football season was a strange experience for him as he tried to figure out how to watch games as a spectator. "I realized how little I knew about getting around Memorial Stadium," he said. "I didn't even really know what to we...

When Jacoby Ford was trying to get back into the NFL, Dabo Swinney wrote personal letters on his behalf to the general managers of every league team. Ford remains close with Swinney and Clemson's football program. In October the former football and track star was inducted into the school's athletics Hall of Fame. Ford, now coaching at his old high school in South Florida, has many thoughts about t...

Nolan Turner, back in Clemson last week during Tampa Bay's open date, was able to take part in the Tigers' tailgating experience for the first time as he went to the Miami game as a fan with James Skalski and others. Turner sits down for an extended interview to talk his remarkable life story, the impact and legacy of his late father Kevin, and what it's been like sharing a locker room with Tom Br...

We check in with two writers in Tampa and Norman to get a sense of what things are like in the wake of Jeff Scott's firing, and in the midst of Oklahoma tumbling to a 5-5 record in Year 1 under Brent Venables. Matt Baker covers South Florida for the Tampa Times. Eli Lederman covers Oklahoma for The Tulsa World. Baker reflects on what sealed the fate of Scott, who came close to a win at Florida ear...

David Hale of ESPN.com rejoins the podcast to discuss the state of college football, and the rather seismic development of both Clemson and Alabama looking as if they'll both be outside of the CFP for the first time in the format's existence. Should Clemson fans be panicking after the humiliation in South Bend? Has complacency creeped into the programs in Tuscaloosa and Upstate South Carolina? Is...

In 2012, Tyler Venables and his brother Jake moved to a strange and different new world when they left Norman for Clemson upon their father becoming the Tigers' defensive coordinator. A decade later, Tyler's sisters are going through the exact same experience in Norman after leaving the place they knew as home when Brent Venables went back to Oklahoma to be head coach. Tyler, a junior safety for C...

Charlie Whitehurst returns to the podcast to share what it was like joining Pat McAfee's live broadcast during the recent Clemson-Florida State game. The highlight of the show for Whitehurst: A show staffer doing dead-on impersonations of Lou Holtz late in the broadcast. Whitehurst gives his perspective on the current situation with DJ Uiagalelei, who was benched temporarily last week against Syra...

Fourteen years ago, Billy D'Andrea was the man who went to fetch Dabo Swinney from the football offices after Terry Don Phillips and Tommy Bowden parted ways. Swinney, then the receivers coach for Clemson, couldn't understand why he was being summoned to the AD's office. "Did I do something wrong?" he asked D'Andrea. "How long is this going to take because we're busy getting ready for Georgia Tech...

Longtime Upstate radio host Mickey Plyler joins the podcast to talk about the furor he caused on his show when he poked fun at the Beastie Boys. The discussion then moves to the calamitous situation unfolding at Oklahoma with Brent Venables' team looking back at three consecutive weeks of performances ranging from inconsistent to downright brutally bad. What does this mean for not just Venables bu...

What is Dave Doeren really like? Is he as much of a jerk as Clemson fans like to think? Joe Giglio has covered N.C. State since Doeren's arrival in late 2012 and says the coach hasn't been easy to get to know during his long tenure in Raleigh. Giglio, formerly a longtime newspaper guy who is currently a radio talk-show host and contributor to WRAL TV, joined the podcast on the drive home from Clem...

Tye Hill watched every bit of last week's double-overtime victory over Wake Forest. He's a hardcore Clemson fan. And, as a former cornerback in college and in the NFL, he pays close attention to his old position. Hill, who lives in the Atlanta area with his family, joins the podcast and goes deep on proper coverage technique. He was as frustrated as any Clemson fan with all the penalties drawn and...

Ben Boulware is a business owner. He's married. He's usually asleep by 8 PM. Boulware said even he's surprised that he's all grown up now. He's come a long way from his playing days as a bombastic, freewheeling force of nature for Clemson's football team. "I'm 28," he said. "But I feel like I'm 58." Boulware, co-owner of The Junkyard fitness centers, said it's been an adventure opening a location...

In addition to his full-time job as a data analyst at Northrup Grumman in Baltimore, Justin Falcinelli is spending considerable time working to affect change as a member of the College Football Players Association. As a member of Clemson's football team from 2015 to 2018, and the starting center on the team that smacked Alabama 44-16 for the national title, Falcinelli has a deep understanding of h...

Longtime Upstate radio host Mickey Plyler rejoins the podcast to talk about the quarterback situation at Clemson. With DJ Uiagalelei having shown clear progress and Cade Klubnik having brought a spark in his limited duty, what's the right play right now for Clemson's coaching staff? What are the pros and cons of giving Klubnik more prominent action to see what he can do? And how might this play ou...

Dustin Fry is in no hurry to get back into college football coaching. He spends most of his time with his wife and two young boys in the hills of North Carolina. He helps out coaching offensive and defensive line at the local high school near Tryon. He is savoring life, and that's hard to do these days in the coaching profession. Fry was on the support staff at Clemson under Chad Morris, and then...