Clemson's Awful Season Shows Why Preseason Polls Need To End. Now

The Clemson Tigers finished out a disastrous season on Saturday, losing to the Penn State Nittany Lions in the Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl, 22-10. 

That result was made even worse by the gigantic personnel loss the Nittany Lions dealt with. A whopping 33 players were unavailable for the bowl game, for one reason or another. Instead of a National Championship winning head coach, like Clemson's Dabo Swinney, Penn State had an interim head coach on the sidelines in Terry Smith. 

Clemson was favored, albeit by only 2.5 points. Yet the Nittany Lions, with everything going against them, still dominated. The Tigers had just 236 total yards and 3.6 yards per play. They allowed Penn State to gain 397 yards and 5.2 yards per play. It was a miracle that the final margin was "only" 12 points. 

The loss meant that Clemson finished the year 7-6, the Tigers' most losses in a season since 2010. That was Swinney's second year on the job and 15 years later, the Tigers are now just 16-10 over the last two seasons. 

There are various reasons and explanations for this. The Tigers have mostly avoided the transfer portal, and while high school recruiting classes have generally remained around the top 20-25, they haven't reached the heights of other top programs in the Big Ten or SEC. Cade Klubnik, who looked like a star in 2024, regressed substantially in 2025. 

But beyond Clemson's issues during the season, what its failure also demonstrated is how ridiculous pre-season rankings are. And more importantly, how they can impact end-of-season rankings, even though they shouldn't.

Dabo Swinney Says He’ll Leave Clemson If Fans Don’t Want Him: "I’ll Go Somewhere Else And Win" (Getty Images)

Clemson's Terrible Season Illustrates Absurdity Of Preseason Polls

Ahead of Week 1, the Tigers sat at No. 4 in the AP Top 25. While analytics-based systems were much lower on the Tigers, it was reasonable enough, considering Klubnik's production and high school pedigree. Then, they lost their first game of the season, at home, to the No. 9 LSU Tigers. 

LSU was also highly overrated, to the point where they too finished the regular season 7-5, even firing head coach Brian Kelly halfway through the year. But LSU's win over Clemson was treated as a monumental achievement, a road win against a preseason top-5 team. Even as LSU looked unimpressive in close wins, they weren't punished in the rankings until the losses piled up. 

Those losses, though, provided a huge boost to their opponents perceived strength of schedule. 

Ole Miss beat LSU 24-19, which helped give the Rebels a "ranked" win. Vanderbilt and Texas A&M also got a "ranked win" out of beating the Tigers. Georgia Tech got a "ranked win" over Clemson, boosting its position later in the season. 

This is why relying on human voters to rank teams before we've seen anything play out on the field is so problematic. Clemson and LSU clearly weren't good enough to be ranked. But because the preseason polls put them not only in the top 25, but the top 10, it took weeks for them to drop out, all while their perceived strength was used to bolster resumes. Those resumes were then relied on by the College Football Playoff committee to determine their rankings. 

And if you think those "ranked wins" didn't matter at the end of the season, they absolutely did. The committee's public remarks are often nonsensical and inconsistent, but they've frequently referred to ranked wins as a measure of strength of schedule, and will change between ranked at the time, and ranked at the end of the season, whenever they see fit. 

Clemson and LSU being ranked in the preseason top 10 absolutely impacted the selection committee, even if they shouldn't. Know how we fix this? Stop ranking teams in the preseason at all.