Jadeveon Clowney doesn’t hate Clemson. He just doesn’t want them to beat South Carolina
Tajh Boyd can probably still feel the hurt that Jadeveon Clowney put him through for three seasons.
The Clemson great won 32 games as a starting quarterback. At the end of each regular season, however, there was that team in garnet and black on the schedule. There was South Carolina’s big defensive end. Michael Myers wearing No. 7. Someone who terrorized Boyd three times.
Clowney — who now plays for the NFL’s Carolina Panthers — told The State last that he’s talked to Boyd a few times over the past decade but admitted, “(We’re) not like homeboys or nothin.’ ”
They reminisce about their college fotball battles in the early 2010s, all of which went the way of Clowney and South Carolina. The Gamecocks won by double-digits in every Palmetto Bowl that Clowney played in (2011, ‘12 and ’13) with the future top-overall pick sacking Boyd 6.5 times.
“Bro,” Clowney said Boyd tells him, “you got the best of me during those times.”
Even a dozen years later, Clowney’s 4.5-sack performance in the 2012 Clemson game still lives in South Carolina lore. If it weren’t for Clowney executing perhaps the greatest hit in college football history a month later in the Outback Bowl, that 2012 performance against the Tigers might lead his collegiate highlight reel.
“I just remember busting them up,” Clowney said of that game.
And, well, South Carolina got the best of Clemson. But the tide has turned since Clowney and Boyd graduated in 2013, with the Tigers winning every Palmetto Bowl since, save for 2022.
And for a chunk of Clemson’s seven-game winning streak over South Carolina, Clowney was playing for the Houston Texans, sharing a locker room with former Clemson stars DeAndre Hopkins and Deshaun Watson.
Often, Clowney said, they’d make friendly wagers on the game, which meant the former Gamecock would have to walk around wearing a Clemson jersey.
He’d take the embarrassment and then “I told them they just couldn’t do it when I was there,” Clowney said.
Earlier this year, Clowney had to spend some time in Clemson when the Panthers held a training camp workout in the Upstate. Tigers coach Dabo Swinney saw him on the practice field and hollered out: “Finally got Clowney to Clemson.”
Some might forget that two weeks before Clowney — the former No. 1 recruit in the country out of South Pointe High — announced his commitment to South Carolina in February 2011, he took an unexpected visit to Clemson.
“I kind of wanted him to go to Clemson,” Clowney’s mom, Josenna, told The Athletic in 2021. “I really liked Dabo. Steve Spurrier was not a people person, and he didn’t give me that hospitality like Dabo Swinney did, so I liked Dabo.”
To this day, Clowney feels the same way about Swinney.
“Dabo’s a great guy,” Clowney said. “It’s a very family-oriented thing he’s got going on down there at Clemson.”
So did Clowney really think about committing to Clemson?
“It was a possibility. It was a possibility,” he said. “I was just a big Carolina fan.”
“I don’t hate (Clemson),” he added. “I just don’t want them to beat Carolina. I don’t care about them winning other games. Just don’t beat us.”
And while Clowney was playing, the Tigers never did.
It is not a coincidence that the best three-year stretch in South Carolina history (2011-’13) was the three years Clowney was a Gamecock. USC won 33 games, won every bowl game and, most important, never lost to Clemson.
“I take a lot of pride in that,” Clowney said, “especially in a rivalry. That’s something you grew up watching. … For me to be a part of that game was very special back in the day. That rivalry, I loved it.”
This story was originally published November 26, 2024 at 7:00 AM.
