6 games. 5 days. Inside a Clemson fan’s crazy Week 1 college football road trip
Last Thursday, Hunter King woke up with a plan.
Well, looking back, it wasn’t really a plan, considering King had no tickets, no parking passes and no hotel rooms. But he did have a goal, and he was dead-set on reaching it — over the next five days, he was going to six college football games.
“I had told my wife and I honestly think she thought I was joking,” said King, who lives in Upstate South Carolina and works in landscaping.
He was not joking. King — who’s also a lifelong Clemson sports fan and has a college football podcast — first got the idea of attending six games in five days when he saw an Aug. 6 post on X from CBS Sports college football reporter Brad Crawford.
Crawford pointed out that a hardcore college football fan in the Carolinas could feasibly make it to five games in five days during Week 1 of the 2025 season:
- ECU at NC State on Thursday, Aug. 28 in Raleigh, 7 p.m.
- App State vs. Charlotte on Friday, Aug. 29 in Charlotte, 7 p.m.
- LSU at Clemson on Saturday, Aug. 30 in Clemson, 7:30 p.m.
- South Carolina vs. Virginia Tech on Sunday, Aug. 31 in Atlanta, 3 p.m.
- TCU at UNC on Monday, Sept. 1 in Chapel Hill, 8 p.m.
King, 26, quickly realized he was about a four-hour drive (or closer) to each game. He also realized Duke was hosting Elon at 7:30 p.m. that Thursday — 30 minutes after NC State kicked off against ECU — and decided to take his challenge a step further.
For reasons King jokes his wife might still not understand, he committed to attending six college football games in five days from Aug. 28-Sept. 1 — the caveat being he’d have to split time between Raleigh and Durham on Thursday night.
Hundreds of miles and many a Red Bull later, he doesn’t regret a second.
“It was definitely worth it,” King said.
Taking on a five-day, six-game journey
Day 1 (592 round-trip miles) started with a haul from his house in Williamston, South Carolina, to Raleigh (about 4 1/2 hours). King arrived at Carter-Finley Stadium well before kickoff, enjoyed the pregame tailgating scene and stayed until roughly halftime of Thursday’s NC State-East Carolina game.
Then he popped down to Durham for the second half of Duke vs. FCS Elon at Wallace Wade Stadium. It was a clunker. Duke and Elon were tied 10-10 at the half, and Elon was within 24-17 at the start of the fourth before Duke pulled away 45-17.
King ended up hustling back to NC State — which has a fan re-entry policy — to catch the final minutes of the Wolfpack’s 24-17 win over the Pirates. Then it was back on the road: Without any hotels booked, King’s house in South Carolina was his home base.
He got back around 3 a.m.
“Getting up that Friday morning and going and jumping on a lawn mower probably wasn’t the most fun thing I’ve ever done in my life,” said King, who runs a landscaping company with his dad. “But we made it happen.”
Day 2 (234 miles) was forgettable from an on-field perspective as App State blitzed Charlotte 34-11 at Bank of America Stadium. But King did down a delicious plate of BBQ burnt ends, probably the best thing he ate all weekend.
Day 3 (54 miles) brought him back to his roots. King grew up a diehard Clemson football fan and still follows the Tigers closely, so he relished a chance to be back in Memorial Stadium for an AP Top 10 matchup — even though Clemson blew a halftime lead and lost 17-10 to LSU in its season opener.
At this point, King had exclusively attended prime-time games. He woke up on Day 4 (272 miles) feeling fatigued and joking that the only thing that could “save [his] weekend” would be a Gamecocks upset loss to Virginia Tech.
That didn’t happen — South Carolina took care of business, winning 24-11 at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium — but King left with a newfound respect for USC quarterback LaNorris Sellers … and one more daunting road trip ahead of him.
1,600 miles and 50,000 steps
Day 5 (508 miles) took King back to North Carolina for TCU at UNC on Labor Day night. TCU won 48-14 in Bill Belichick’s coaching debut at a packed Kenan Stadium — that 34-point margin was the largest of any game King attended.
The only positive: King has a random affinity for TCU because he picked them as his go-to team on the video game “NCAA Football 06” years ago as a kid, so he wore a Horned Frogs T-shirt and got to watch one of his adopted teams win.
His reward: Driving 4 1/2 hours back home, solo.
“Honestly, the only rough one was Monday,” said King, who credited his Red Bull addiction for helping keep him alert on the road well past midnight.
The final stats from King’s weekend excursion: $770 in ticket costs ($350 for one Clemson-LSU ticket), $250 in parking costs and about $1,200 to $1,300 in total spending, including in-stadium food and drink purchases and gas. He drove roughly 1,622 miles across North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia in his Dodge Ram 2500 truck and took about 50,000 steps from Thursday to Monday.
And he did it … just to do it? Pretty much.
King said he loves college football and — even though he attended five of six games by himself — he made friends at every stop. He was “blown away” by NC State’s stadium, chopped it up with LSU fans and already wants to get back to Chapel Hill, a “magical” college town, with his wife, Sydney, and 1.5-year-old daughter, Scottie.
Just not this weekend.
“The closer it got, the crazier it sounded,” King said. “But I think it was worth it. At the end, as tired as I am, it was really fun.”
