The Clemson Dubcast

When Mark Spede took over at Clemson in 2002, the Tigers' marching band consisted of 160 members. Now the number is 356, and the football team's six straight trips to the College Football Playoff (and two national titles) gave Spede a trove of stories to share from criss-crossing the country with his large traveling party.

He remembers trying to control his emotions in January of 2017 in Tampa immediately after Hunter Renfrow cradled Deshaun Watson's pass in the end zone. It normally takes three seconds for the band to crank up Tiger Rag after a touchdown. This time it took 17 seconds for him to get himself and everyone else under control.

As the president of the College Band Directors National Association, Spede found himself with no choice but to dive head-first into the science of a pandemic in March of 2020 after everything shut down and the entire performing-arts world faced existential questions.

He helped spearhead the International Performing Arts Aerosol study, which ended up pioneering the path to marching bands at the college and high school level reconvening and playing safely.

Spede's leadership and research drew so much attention in the early days of the pandemic that he was receiving 400 to 500 emails a day from not just the United States but abroad. And he said he answered every one of them.

Dr. Spede is Professor, Director of Bands, Director of Tiger Band, and Conductor of the Symphonic Band at Clemson University, where he administrates the band program (symphonic, athletic, and jazz bands). He is the recipient of the Clemson University 2009 Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching (College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities), and three Clemson University Board of Trustees Awards for Faculty Excellence (2008, 2009, and 2012). He teaches a number of courses, including two for the Calhoun Honors College: aesthetics of music and science of music. In 2012, he conducted the Clemson University Symphonic Band at venues in London, England, for the Summer Olympic Games. Also in 2012, he founded the Clemson Faculty Jazz Quintet, for which he plays drums.

Spede earned a Bachelor of Music from the University of Michigan (1984), and Master of Music from Ball State University (1988), and a Doctor of Musical Arts from The University of Texas at Austin (1998). 

At 26 years old, Riley Morningstar is younger than everyone who works for him at The Journal newspaper in Seneca.

Less than a year ago, Morningstar became the editor of the newspaper and dived into making it the news outlet of record in Oconee County.

When he was a student at Clemson, Morningstar was an intern for Tigerillustrated.com. He also served as a student assistant in the men's basketball program during the Tigers' run to the Round of 16.

Morningstar talks how he chose the journalism path even though Clemson doesn't have a journalism school. He shares what it's like to draw the ire of public officials and even the public when he presses for information he deems of value to his readers.

And he shares what it was like in the fall of 2016 when he asked a question Dabo Swinney didn't like and found himself on the receiving end of an epic Swinney tirade. Morningstar still has the audio of the rant, which came a few days after Clemson's only loss in a national championship season.

Mike Noonan, fresh off bringing Clemson its first men's soccer championship since 1987, joins the podcast to talk what it means and how his life is different.

Noonan also retraces the fateful steps that led his choosing Clemson after a 15-year career leading Brown University. Syracuse had also offered him its coaching job, and he ended up choosing the Tigers because of the warmth he and his family felt during their trip down for the interview.

Within Noonan's first year on the job at Clemson in 2010, he was appalled at the heat on a second-year football coach named Dabo Swinney amid a losing season. From what he had observed of Swinney during that short time, Noonan believed Swinney had the makings of a great coach.

Years later, Noonan was not happy when his practice fields were displaced by construction on Clemson's new football facility -- construction that began when the soccer team was in the NCAA playoffs. He remembers Swinney promising him that he'd help him get a much better soccer facility, and that promise was later fulfilled.

In late December, Tigerillustrated.com reported an in-depth series of articles on freshman quarterback Cade Klubnik.

In this podcast, we present the lengthy interviews we conducted with Klubnik's mother Kim, his paster Brad Thomas (a Clemson grad) and Klubnik himself.

In less than a month, Klubnik will take the field for Clemson and begin contending with starting quarterback DJ Uiagalelei as the Tigers try to add more flash to an offense that sagged in 2021.

Klubnik was the No. 1 ranked quarterback in the country and led Westlake High School to back-to-back state championships, never losing a game as a starter.

In the interviews, he and his mother reflect on what it was like upon hearing that Ty Simpson, whom Clemson had offered, chose Alabama to pave the way for Klubnik to join Dabo Swinney's Tigers.

In 2015, David Shelton lost a child to opioid addiction when his 26-year-old son Ryan died of an overdose. Ryan was a massive Clemson fan, and his ashes are buried across the street from The Hill at Death Valley and in Lake Hartwell.

Three weeks ago, Shelton lost another son to addiction when son Justin, also 26, died of a heroin overdose while living in a tent city behind a Wal-Mart.

The first time it happened, David was embarrassed and ashamed and dealt with the torturous grief privately.

This time, he's determined to make a second unfathomable loss as public as he can in hopes of serving his community and preventing the same thing from happening to others.

Shelton is a longtime sportswriter for The Post and Courier newspaper, covering high schools and small colleges.

The grandson of Italian immigrants on both sides, Bill D'Andrea grew up in a small Pennsylvania town and neither of his parents made it through high school because of difficult circumstances.

D'Andrea always thought that upbringing allowed him to connect with the athletes he oversaw in the 1990s as the head of Vickery Hall, the pioneering academic-support system for Clemson's athletes.

D'Andrea did it all during his professional career, including coaching under Danny Ford and athletics administration in leading IPTAY and as Terry Don Phillips' right-hand man when Clemson was making major decisions including the hires of Dabo Swinney, Oliver Purnell and Brad Brownell.

D'Andrea has worked to serve his community since retirement, and now he's serving as a municipal judge in Central. 

D'Andrea joins the podcast to talk about his long and fascinating story while giving his take on the seismic changes afoot in college athletics including Name, Image and Likeness and the transfer portal.

D'Andrea recalls being in the room in November of 2010 when, after a second consecutive loss to South Carolina, he and Swinney thought Terry Don Phillips was about to fire the Tigers' second-year head coach (they were both surprised when Phillips said "I've never believed in you more than I do right now," and Clemson took off the next year on a streak of 10-win seasons that has continued to this day).

D'Andrea was also in the room when Swinney almost quit before he'd even coached a game as Clemson's official, non-interim coach. 

You read that right: In December of 2009, not long after he'd gotten the job, Swinney was angry Clemson wasn't committing more money to the football program and he almost walked. That's how D'Andrea remembers it.

In the midst of last week's big news that Nick Eason is returning to his alma mater to join Dabo Swinney's staff, we visit with two of the most important figures in Eason's life.

Rick Stockstill was the primary Clemson recruiter of Eason in the late 1990s, and even as bigger schools began courting him Eason was loyal to Stockstill and the first school that offered him.

Stockstill recalls the type of person Eason was during his time at Clemson, and the man he's become since as a longtime NFL player, NFL assistant and now a college coach.

Bryant McNeal and Eason were in the same recruiting class at Clemson and instantly became close friends. Later they were both drafted by the Denver Broncos and spent their first year there as roommates.

McNeal, now an assistant football coach and head girls basketball coach at Swansea High School, shares how Eason blossomed in college both academically and as a devotee of community service.

"Our first summer here, we had just finished August camp and Nick's like: 'Come with me over to Central to visit with this little-league football team,'" McNeal recalled. "He just loves people, and he loved doing community service both when we were at Clemson and also when we were in Denver." 

In December of 2010, Tulsa's football team was in Hawaii going through pre-practice stretching in preparation for the Hawaii Bowl.

First-year offensive coordinator Chad Morris walked past Tyler Carlton and casually asked: "You want to come with me to Clemson?"

Carlton, a native of Oklahoma and a former player and support staffer at Tulsa, left with Morris when Dabo Swinney hired him to breathe life back into Clemson's offense.

Carlton, now the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Wofford, said the four years he spent at Clemson changed his life in many ways including the impact of working under and learning life lessons from Dabo Swinney.

During that time Carlton also became close with a support staffer named Wesley Goodwin. The two were roommates, and they spent the wee hours of many nights watching film cut-ups of the old Bill Belichick and Nick Saban defenses. Goodwin is now the co-defensive coordinator and chief play-caller after the departure of Brent Venables to Oklahoma.

Carlton takes an entertaining trip down memory lane, recalling vivid memories of a Clemson program transitioning from good to great.

In the fall of 2018, Dabo Swinney allowed Tigerillustrated.com to be a fly on the McFadden Building walls as he returned to Clemson's old football offices to reminisce.

This was part of a series on the 10th anniversary of the tumultuous day in October of 2008 when Tommy Bowden was out and Swinney was in on an interim basis.

Not many people thought Swinney was head-coaching material, but Terry Don Phillips gambled and hit the most important jackpot in Clemson sports history.

Swinney won the job that fall, and years later orchestrated one of the most remarkable stories in college football history by elevating the Tigers to a six-year stay on college football's mountaintop.

This is the raw audio from our recording that day following Swinney around the old football offices. At the time, Swinney was trying to hold it all together after Kelly Bryant left the team and Trevor Lawrence suffered a shoulder injury in his first start against Syracuse.

The 2018 Tigers ended up finding their groove with Lawrence and rampaging to their second national title in three years.

Berry Tramel is the most respected media voice regarding the Oklahoma Sooners, and David Teel the same with the Virginia Cavaliers.

The two decorated newspaper columnists join the podcast to reflect on Brent Venables becoming the head coach at Oklahoma and Tony Elliott the head coach at Virginia.

Tramel developed a relationship with Venables at his first stop in Norman, a 13-year run as a defensive assistant under Bob Stoops. He says one of the most interesting themes will be how Venables makes the adjustment from fire-breathing defensive coordinator to a head-coaching role that demands a more measured and organized approach.

In July of 2018, Teel was invited to observe and write about the NCAA Champion Forum, a career development program for accomplished minority assistant coaches. Elliott was among the participants, and it struck Teel then that he had all the makings of a head coach.

“There are four categories where I think [student-athletes] have got to have equal development,” Elliott told Teel that day, “and that’s their athletics, their academics, their social and the spiritual. You have to create a program that has access to all those areas and have the resources in place.”

Teel says Elliott's biggest challenge will be galvanizing the community and inspiring supporters to do something that hasn't been done in a long time -- consistently fill Scott Stadium.