The Clemson Dubcast

What in the world is going on with Clemson?

Eric Mac Lain and Ellis Johnson have some thoughts.

Mac Lain, who played offensive line for Dabo Swinney, is quite critical of the offensive line play he's seen thus far.

He's also not sure what to make of Cade Klubnik's jittery presence over the first two games.

Johnson, a former assistant at both South Carolina and Clemson, now lives in Clemson so he can be close to his son, a walk-on tight end for the Tigers.

Johnson thinks the issues this team has shown thus far on both sides of the ball can be solved over the course of the season

But he's not sure they can be resolved Saturday against Georgia Tech, a physically and mentally tough group that can make life extremely difficult on some of the inexperience Clemson has in the secondary.

"Georgia Tech has been playing to their level of talent, and Clemson has not," Johnson said. "Hopefully they can get it turned around, but I think it's going to be a tough test for Clemson. I really do.

"If they don't find a running game that they can lean on in critical times of the game, they're going to be in trouble."

Every summer, Tigerillustrated.com sits down with Brad Brownell for a lengthy interview in his office.

This year's interview came in early July when Brownell was still in the formative stages of assimilating an almost entirely new roster after significant attrition from last year's team that went 18-2 in the ACC.

The Q&A originally appeared as a multi-part series at Tigerillustrated.com.

This is the full, uncut audio from a sit-down that lasted almost 80 minutes.

Dave Clawson and Dabo Swinney became good friends over the course of Clawson's 11 seasons as head coach at Wake Forest.

Clawson came agonizingly close to beating Clemson but never did, and he says he's particularly haunted by the 2022 game the Tigers won 51-45 in double overtime on the Deacons' home field.

Clawson has great respect for not just the program and culture Swinney has built, but for the 2025 team that he believes looks a lot like the powerhouse that won two national titles and advanced to the playoffs every season from 2015 to 2020.

Bryce Koon covers LSU for The Bengal Tiger of the On3 network. He joins the podcast to share what Brian Kelly is like behind the scenes and says it's quite a lot different from what is perceived from afar.

How many LSU fans will trek to Clemson, even those who aren't going to get into the stadium? How much pressure is on Kelly to win big this year? And what can Clemson fans expect a year from now when Swinney's Tigers return the favor and visit Baton Rouge?

Matt Luke and Nick Eason recently sat down for lengthy interviews to preview the 2025 season. This is the uncut audio from those sessions.

Luke is entering his second year as Clemson's offensive line coach after two years away from the game. He says there's no other job at any other school that would have pulled him away from his sabbatical.

Eason, entering his fourth season at his alma mater, has a stacked group of defensive tackles including Peter Woods and DeMonte Capehart.

Clemson opens its season Aug. 30 against LSU.

Garrett Riley and Tyler Grisham recently sat down for lengthy interviews to preview the 2025 season.

We present the uncut audio from both sessions.

Riley is entering his third year as Clemson's offensive coordinator after Dabo Swinney lured him from TCU following the Horned Frogs' run to the national championship game.

Grisham, a Clemson grad, has arguably the top receiving corps in college football with Antonio Williams, Bryant Wesco, TJ Moore, Tyler Brown and transfer Tristan Smith.

Clemson opens the season Aug. 30 against LSU.

Tom Allen and Ben Boulware recently participated in media interviews in advance of the 2025 season.

We present the uncut audio from both of their interviews.

Dabo Swinney pulled off a coup in landing Allen after the firing of Wes Goodwin, who lasted three years as the Tigers' defensive coordinator.

Boulware, who is in charge of the linebackers, spent the previous year in a support-staff role for his alma mater. 

Clemson's defense is poised to make a major rebound from the group that struggled mightily to stop the run last season.

What does it do to the mind of an 18-year-old college athlete to have hundreds of thousands of dollars in his bank account?

"I pray for them all the time," Tremayne Anchrum said. "Because I had a great upbringing. I had great parents. I had a great support system. And you know what? I still did a lot of stupid things. So I can't really imagine people with no support system and who have bad influences, listening to everyone who DM's them. They might not have the best decision-making process. I definitely feel for them, because it's hard being young in this time period. And I don't think people give enough grace when they see people mess up. You're a product of your environment, and a lot of people don't come up in the best environment. So now you add money to that mix, and things might not be perfect."

The collegiate model was totally different when Anchrum was an offensive lineman for Clemson from 2016 to 2019. Since then he has been in the NFL and seen what it's like behind the scenes at the professional level.

Anchrum, currently a free agent, is back in Clemson this summer training at the Tigers' football facilities.

He joined The Dubcast to talk about life after football, what to make of the current state of the college game, and his enduring love for Dabo Swinney.

In 2019, Marcus Lattimore was inducted into the University of South Carolina Athletic Hall of Fame and it looked like one of the happiest moments of his life.

Instead, he was at a major life crossroads as he battled the trauma from trying to figure out his identity away from football.

Soon thereafter, Lattimore and his wife moved to Oregon and he basically scrubbed every trace of football from his existence.

For so long, Lattimore was universally recognized and beloved back in his home state. People felt like they knew him because of what he did in a No. 21 jersey and what he said in press conferences after games.

Turned out they didn't know much about him at all. Turned out he didn't even really know himself.

Lattimore, who has been in Portland for the last five years, has made a whole new life for himself as a spoken-word poet and a speaker at drug and alcohol rehab centers.

He recently published his first book titled "Scream My Name," a story of how one of the most prominent names in Palmetto State sports history found his true self and transformed his life.

Lattimore's football career basically ended when he suffered a devastating knee injury in 2012 against Tennessee.

"It's been a grueling experience, but it's definitely been worth it," Lattimore said. "I was dealing with a lot of uncertainty and a lot of existential questions that I wanted answers to. Like: Who am I outside of football? And what do I do outside of football? If you keep throwing those questions into the atmosphere, it's going to lead you somewhere."

These are the same questions, and the same trauma, that confront high-profile athletes from all over when the cheering stops and they look in the mirror. Former Clemson star Tajh Boyd battled years of depression when his NFL aspirations were cut short and he tried to carve a niche in the real world.

Lattimore is speaking for Boyd and many others when he reflects:

"From a very early age, I thought that football was who I was as a human being. So when it's stripped away, there's a dying in a sense. Part of you dies. The old me died and I had to figure out how to go about life, how to resurrect as Marcus Lattimore without a football. Those were questions that I couldn't run from.

"When you're 18 years old and you hear 60,000 people screaming your name, your brain changes forever. Pleasure was around every corner for me. You need a balance, and I couldn't find that balance at home."

Lattimore also shares something that has never been revealed publicly: He committed silently to Clemson assistant Jeff Scott in the summer of 2009 before his senior year at Byrnes High School.

He later signed with South Carolina, but he said he has a deep respect for Dabo Swinney and the culture he's built over 16 seasons as the Tigers' head coach.

Brian Murphy is based in Raleigh and his title is Sports Investigative Reporter for WRAL TV.

Of late there's been a lot to investigate at North Carolina's football program as Bill Belichick operates in a shroud of secrecy so thick that his players didn't have jersey numbers during the Tar Heels' recent spring game.

In addition, Belichick's 24-year-old girlfriend has taken on a strange role within the football program as she regularly scrutinizes UNC's communications staff for not doing a better job protecting the image of Belichick and those below him (including Bill's son Steve, the Tar Heels' defensive coordinator).

Here is an excerpt from Murphy's coverage of a spring game that was not remotely like most spring games:

No numbers on the jerseys for any player throughout spring or in Saturday's final practice.

No player interviews throughout spring or after Saturday's final practice.

No assistant coach interviews throughout spring or after Saturday's final practice.

Belichick spoke to the media near the beginning of spring practice ... and not again. Not even at the end of Saturday's event. Didn’t even pick up the microphone to thank everyone for coming out or tell them how important their presence this fall would be.

Murphy, a graduate of UNC, is a former newspaper sportswriter who covered Georgia Tech during the Chan Gailey era before moving to Boise and having a front-row seat to the Broncos' incredible rise to football prominence.

He was there for Boise State's unforgettable 43-42 triumph over Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl.

Before moving back to his roots in Raleigh he lived in Washington D.C., where he covered Congress for the News & Observer of Raleigh.

Joey Batson, Clemson's longtime and iconic strength and conditioning coach, is planning for 2025 to be his final season with the Tigers.

In the midst of this news broken today by Tigerillustrated.com, we revisit a 2021 interview we conducted with Batson in his office just months after he underwent open-heart surgery.

"Being a coach all these years, you want to push," Batson said then. "You just want to keep pushing. But then you're having to pull yourself back, saying: 'I don't know if that's very smart.'"