The Clemson Dubcast

Eric Mac Lain's job with the ACC Network and ESPN is calling things like he sees them on the football field.

And of late, that's meant calling out the program that he loves and played for.

Mac Lain, who played his final season at Clemson in 2015 when the Tigers advanced to the national title game, joins the podcast to reflect on his process and how he navigates criticizing people he loves and admires.

Mac Lain lives in Columbia with his wife and 1-year-old daughter. During the week he does most of his work from a garage he converted into a studio for his work on television, satellite radio and podcasts.

Mac Lain spent three days at Clemson's practices during August camp and walked away feeling uplifted about the offense. He's spent much of the past two months wondering what happened as the Tigers sit at 4-3.

"It's the most bizarre thing," he said. "You just wonder how they got to this point. I think it's unfortunate. Hopefully there are things that can be done and will be done to fix this. But as much as people want to place the blame on Dabo Swinney or a play call, he's not the one fumbling at the 1-yard line. He's not the one making an errant throw or deciding to pull a ball when a run is called. He's not missing a tackle or not run-fitting correctly. ...

"But at the end of the day the man who will take the brunt of the blame is the head coach. There's a reason he's paid so much. There's a reason he makes the decisions. He's earned all that. But with that comes criticism."

Reggie Merriweather has a rather indelible memory of being recruited by Clemson.

Tommy Bowden and assistant Rick Stockstill stopped by his home in North Augusta on a Sunday. 

As the two coaches and the Merriweather family watched NFL football, Bowden took off his shoes and propped his feet on the coffee table.

"My mom didn't like that," Merriweather said. "She asked him to please take his feet off the table, and then they were out the door soon after that."

Merriweather ended up going to Clemson, and he views that choice as central to his becoming the man he is today. He works in construction and is in his seventh season working for the Clemson Radio Network as a football analyst.

Merriweather reflects on the balance between his loyalty to his alma mater and many friends who are on the coaching staff, and his desire to speak the truth during some difficult moments -- including the late-game play-calling on offense in Clemson's overtime loss to Florida State last month.

Merriweather said he has a habit of throwing his headsets in the booth during some of the more confounding moments, and he said he's tossed them quite a bit over the past two-plus seasons.

Given the torment and abuse he suffered for years after his missed field goal late against South Carolina in 2006, it's a surprise to hear that Jad Dean is currently as big a message-board junkie as anyone.

Dean is an avid subscriber to Tigerillustrated.com, refreshes the site non-stop through the day, and he even visits Saturday in-game message-board threads that can turn nasty in a hurry.

It took Dean years to fully get past the missed kick that allowed the team he grew up hating to walk out of Death Valley with a narrow win 17 years ago.

For a while he tortured himself over that kick, telling himself he probably should've instead gone to play at Georgia where the weight of his lifetime of loving Clemson wouldn't have affected him in a game and pushed him away from the school and fans he loved.

He can laugh about a lot of it now -- the double birds from the elderly woman as he departed the stadium that day, teammate Phillip Merling trying to go into the stands and confront the woman in defense of his teammate, and the wild behavior of fanatics whose emotional stability is tied to the actions of college kids on a football field.

In fact, Dean considers himself one of those fanatics these days as he yells at the television screen when things aren't going great with his Tigers.

Dean joins The Clemson Dubcast to reflect on his long journey since his college career ended, and the healthy perspective he has on it all now.

Tim Cowan's seats at Death Valley are so low in the north lower deck that leaving via the field is his preferred route after every game. It beats having to wait until all the foot traffic clears from the steps above.

Cowan became a sensation last week when it was discovered that he placed himself behind the last three coaches who have won at Clemson during their postgame TV interviews -- Pitt's Pat Narduzzi in 2016, South Carolina's Shane Beamer in 2022, and Florida State's Mike Norvell last month.

Once upon a time, Cowan spent seven years as a Clemson student in the 1990s and actually owned a downtown bar for a stretch. The bar was called Rumors, and Cowan became good friends with a number of football players during that time including quarterback Brandon Streeter.

Cowan also recalls Run DMC playing a festival on Clemson's campus. Cowan met the group backstage and paid them $500 to show up and perform at Rumors later that night.

"They pulled up in a white van, and when they rolled their windows down a huge cloud of marijuana smoke comes pouring out of the van," Cowan recalled. "I told them the cops down here probably weren't going to be cool with that."

Cowan lives in the Atlanta area and is a realtor. He said he loves life as a Clemson football fan, doesn't get overly emotional about it, and he predicts he won't be standing behind any opposing coaches after games because the Tigers aren't going to lose at home anytime soon.

Chapel Fowler of The State newspaper tracked down Cowan last week after his postgame videos went viral and told his story. He described Cowan's vibe after the three home losses as "a parent who's not mad at you, just disappointed."

Fowler reflects on growing up as the son of prominent Charlotte sportswriter Scott Fowler. He also shares what it's been like getting a closer look at Dabo Swinney since he began covering Clemson football in the summer of 2022.

When he was a third-grader living in the projects of Tallahassee, DeAndre McDaniel learned his mother was taken to jail yet again.

From there it took a village to keep McDaniel on the straight and narrow, as his grandmother Dot and godmother Kim wrapped their arms around him and protected him through middle school and high school.

When Dabo Swinney began recruiting McDaniel in high school, that support group was convinced Clemson and not FSU was the place where DeAndre would grow into a man.

Tonight McDaniel will be inducted into the Clemson Athletics Hall of Fame. He is in his ninth season on Swinney's staff, and he has his master's degree plus an enormous amount of gratitude to the people who shaped him.

In this interview, McDaniel shares his life story in full for the first time -- from growing up way too fast as a child, to the devastation of not making it in the NFL, to working at a Wal-Mart as he adjusted to the real world, to returning to Clemson when Swinney told him it was time to come back home.

Jeff Scott has coached on some of the highest-pressure stages imaginable -- five consecutive playoff trips from 2015 to 2019, four national championship games, and a load of other important games during the regular seasons.

He finds that the pressure of coaching 4-and-under youth soccer brings its own stresses as other parents look on at practices and games.

Scott, fired from South Florida late last year, is enjoying the good life after he moved his family back to Clemson. The buyout in his contract gave him the luxury of taking his sweet time as he evaluates what's next for him. And the time with his wife and two young children is definitely sweet.

Scott joins the podcast to reflect on what that next step might be and when it might happen. But he says he honestly has no clue right now because he's too busy making up for time lost when he was grinding away working 80-hour weeks and dealing with the non-stop stresses and pressures of coaching.

Scott shares his favorite recruiting story, which involved a campus visit by Tony Steward. A hotel room was booked for Steward, but Scott ended up having to pull an intoxicated Clemson fan out of the room and re-make the bed just in time for Steward's arrival.

Scott also gives his assessment of the state of college football with NIL and the transfer portal, where he thinks things are headed, and how he thinks Dabo Swinney will adapt to the rapidly changing landscape.

David Pollack spent more than a decade carving a stellar reputation as a no-nonsense, entertaining presence with ESPN's college football coverage.

And then he received a call this past offseason that he couldn't believe:

He was laid off with a large group of other prominent personalities as Disney and The Worldwide Leader continue to grapple with the effects of cord-cutting and over-leveraging with TV contracts that were signed during more prosperous times.

Pollack joins The Clemson Dubcast to reflect on how he quickly pivoted to appreciating the good that came from his termination -- it allowed him to spend more time at his home in the Athens area with his wife and children ages 15 and 13. It allowed him to sit around on Saturdays and watch college football as a fan.

Pollack is an assistant coach at North Oconee High School and a mentor to Clemson freshman Khalil Barnes. The two talk almost every day, and their connection is rooted more in their Christianity than what takes place on the football field.

Pollack said there's no mystery at all as to why Barnes ended up at Clemson.

"He wanted to go to a place that was going to push him not just on the field but off the field. He's been telling me about some of the speakers they have come in, and what they're going through and what they talk about, and how the coaches are. He loves the atmosphere.

"If you're going to talk about culture ... that's Dabo and Clemson. It's a unique place. It's a unique set of values. It's a unique system. With that and Clemson's big-time program and big-time success, it made it pretty easy for KB."

Pollack said Dabo Swinney is one of the few coaches with whom he has a meaningful relationship. He said Swinney was one of the people who called to offer him support after he was laid off.

Though Pollack thinks highly of Swinney as a man, leader and coach, he does point out that he was one of the first analysts to say years ago that Swinney and Clemson were risking falling behind by not making more use of the transfer portal. He believes Swinney will make more use of it moving forward.

Matt Bockhorst was one of many people close to the team who bought into the offseason optimism about Garrett Riley and Cade Klubnik helping transform the mindset of not just the offense but the entire program.

There was an air of rejuvenation and confidence that was palpable when Bockhorst made a trip to Clemson to watch an August scrimmage.

Very little of that materialized under the lights in Clemson's nightmarish season-opening 28-7 loss at Duke on Monday night.

The litany of critical gaffes on both sides of the ball has many people questioning the mental makeup of this program, and Bockhorst is one of them.

"They're on their heels now," he said. "I think they're all rolling into the football facility today questioning everything about the preparation they've done for the last nine months. Like: 'Are we fraudsters just acting like we deserve to be here?' ...

"If they didn't have an edge before, they better get one soon. Otherwise we've got really big problems."

Bockhorst was an offensive lineman for Clemson from 2017 to 2021.

After a crucial penalty call went against Clemson late in a 2007 loss at Georgia Tech, Lucas Glover threw his remote control through the screen of his brand-new HD television set.

Yeah, you might say he's a big fan of his alma mater.

Big enough to have subscribed to Tigerillustrated.com for two decades and made it a significant part of his daily routine.

Big enough to pop in and post to the website's message board from time to time (his handle is @JudgeSchmails) to thank fans for their support, or to weigh in on the latest developments on the PGA Tour.

Glover joins the podcast to talk about his spectacular summer run on the Tour, his disappointment for not being selected to the Ryder Cup, and his successful overcoming of the putting yips that tormented him for close to a decade.

As the chancellor at the University of North Carolina from 2008 to 2013, Holden Thorp was front-and-center for some seismic athletics-related events.

When he took the job he thought his main mission from trustees was to make UNC more like MIT academically. He soon learned otherwise as an NCAA scandal unfolded in Chapel Hill involving fake classes and a compromised tutor for the Tar Heels' football program who was also the nanny for coach Butch Davis.

"What I learned was that the relative priority of athletics compared to academics at Carolina was a lot different from what I thought," Thorp said. "There was always a folklore and a legend that academics and integrity were put above winning. North Carolina made it 50 years without having to confront these things. Part of that was just dumb luck: The NCAA never picked up on some things that were going on. And part of it was excellent management as well.

"But the truth is Carolina was winning the same way a lot of schools win. The weren't magically not having a lot of the same problems that all these other schools did. The house of cards came tumbling down, and everyone in Chapel Hill realized the school is really no different than any other school that's wildly successful in athletics, or wants to be wildly successful in athletics."

Thorp was also chancellor when the ACC added Pittsburgh and Syracuse in 2011. He said that North Carolina could've gone to the SEC at that time, but that the additions of Notre Dame as a part-time member and Louisville helped bind the conference together with a Grant of Rights initially signed in 2013.

Thorp said there was great debate in the ACC about the Louisville addition. A significant number of presidents preferred Connecticut because of the Huskies' basketball profile, but Thorp and then-commissioner John Swofford persuaded enough schools to vote for Louisville.

Thorp was the chairman of the ACC's Council of Presidents at the time.

"UConn and Cincinnati were trying to get us to invite them," he said. "Clemson and Florida State were adamant that they wanted Louisville. Swofford and I felt that keeping those two happy with football was critically important. So we got everybody on board with adding Louisville."

Thorp is the editor in chief of the Science family of journals.