Concerning home losses pile up for Clemson football, Dabo as SMU looms
Clemson football’s 40-game home winning streak was stunning.
What’s happened since then? Arguably more stunning.
Coach Dabo Swinney and the Tigers rattled off 40 straight home wins at Memorial Stadium from the middle of the 2016 season through the end of 2022. It was the longest streak in ACC history and tied for the eighth-longest streak in FBS history.
Yet Clemson (3-3, 2-2 ACC) enters Saturday’s game against SMU having lost three of its last four home games and four straight against power conference teams.
Yes, four. Since beating Virginia in October 2024, Clemson is just 2-4 at home, losing to Louisville and South Carolina in 2024 and LSU and Syracuse in 2025.
The Tigers’ only home wins in that stretch are 51-14 in 2024 against The Citadel, an FCS team, and 27-16 in 2025 against Troy, a Sun Belt team that led Clemson by 16 points in the second quarter and 13 points at halftime.
Swinney and Clemson still have the nation’s third-best home winning percentage in the College Football Playoff era dating back to 2014 (71-7, .910). But recent history indicates the current Death Valley isn’t the untouchable, “impossible to win at” venue it was for years under Swinney.
After a two-game road winning streak got Clemson to .500 overall and in conference play, getting back on track at Memorial Stadium is the team’s top priority, Swinney said Tuesday during his weekly news conference.
“Our big goal this week is to play well at home,” Swinney said. “We have not done that. We’ve got to get back to how we’re capable of playing here in the Valley. Our fans deserve that. Unbelievable support here.”
Clemson’s weird start to 2025 home schedule
Clemson had one of its best home atmospheres in years heading into its Week 1 opener against LSU (its first home opener since 2019). Memorial Stadium was packed out and raucous for an AP Top 10 matchup in a prime-time television slot, which also featured alcohol sales inside the stadium for the first time.
Since then, the vibes have been … off.
Clemson dropped its opener 17-10 to a talented LSU team that currently sits at No. 10 in the AP Top 25. The following week, Swinney’s preseason No. 4 Tigers got pounced on by Troy — a G5 team they were expected to blow out — and had to mount a furious third-quarter comeback to avoid a loss.
Then Syracuse marched into Death Valley and gashed Clemson’s defense in a 34-21 win on Sept. 28 that dropped Clemson to 1-3 and 1-2 at home in 2025 and featured multiple instances of fans booing the team off the field. Swinney was visibly emotional while singing the postgame alma mater.
Not exactly the warm fuzzies Clemson had gotten used to — and earned — by going over six calendar years without a single home loss in its 81,500-seat stadium.
“We’ve stunk,” Swinney said. “We’ve not done well. LSU’s a good team. It’s not like they stink. But we had a chance to win the game. Didn’t make some of the plays that were there. … And then the Syracuse game, we just didn’t even start playing defense until the third quarter.”
Other schools lapping Clemson in recent home record
Some other stats illustrating Clemson’s recent home woes:
- Swinney is 103-13 at home in his Clemson career. Five of those 13 losses have come over the last three seasons alone. Clemson lost one home game in 2023 (No. 4 Florida State), two in 2024 (Louisville, No. 16 USC) and two so far in 2025.
- Starting with the 2022 home loss to South Carolina, Clemson is 12-6 at home (.705) overall and just 7-6 (.538) at home against power conference opponents. That includes two double-digit losses to ACC teams in which Clemson was a double-digit betting favorite (Louisville in 2024, Syracuse in 2025).
- There are over 50 FBS teams with a better home winning percentage than Clemson (12-5) over the last three seasons. The teams at the top of the list include Ohio State (18-1), Ole Miss (18-1), Oregon (17-1) and LSU (17-1). Farther down, teams like Saturday’s opponent SMU (15-2), Kansas State (14-3), Duke (13-3) and Georgia Tech (12-3) have comfortably outpaced the Tigers.
Those trends are stacking up at a time when Clemson desperately needs to recapture some kind of home-field advantage. After back-to-back road games, the Tigers will not play a game outside the state of South Carolina for nearly a month.
Clemson hosts SMU (4-2, 2-0 ACC) on Saturday before taking its second of two scheduled off weeks and returning to host Duke (Nov. 1) and Florida State (Nov. 8) before playing its ACC finale on the road at Louisville on Friday, Nov. 14.
A three-game homestand is a great opportunity for a 3-3 team to pick up some — or all — of the three additional wins it needs to reach bowl eligibility. And although lightning delays have significantly impacted two straight home games, Clemson fans are still showing up (79,872 fans per game, just shy of the usual sellout).
But a team that’s struggled in its own venue needs to show up and make it happen.
“I think it’s very important to make sure our fans are getting their money’s worth coming to our games,” Clemson running back Keith Adams Jr. said. “Because they’re doing their part by coming and supporting us. We’ve gotta do our part by winning.”
This story was originally published October 14, 2025 at 2:03 PM.
