The Clemson Dubcast

Shaka Smart, fourth-year basketball coach at Texas, sits down for an extended interview to reminisce about the days at Clemson when he was an assistant for Oliver Purnell and Dabo Swinney was a receivers coach for Tommy Bowden. Smart, Will Wade and Michael Morrell are now running their own programs, and all three have ardently followed Swinney's rise from afar -- to the point of scheduling their own practices around Clemson's football games so they can watch.

Cole Cubelic, former Auburn offensive lineman and an ESPN/SEC Network sideline analyst, visits to talk Clemson-Texas A&M and a bunch of other topics -- including growing up in the Palmetto State and attending numerous Clemson-South Carolina football games as a child. His aunt, Mary Anne Cubelic-Grant, is in the Clemson Hall of Fame thanks to a distinguished basketball career.

Former Clemson safety Robert Smith talks his relationship with former Tiger great Tye Hill, the raw emotion of finally snapping the losing streak to South Carolina in 2014, the dramatic goal-line stand against Louisville the same year, the X-and-O wizardry of Brent Venables, and much more.

Former Clemson safety Robert Smith, a key figure on the Tigers' dominant 2014 defense, talks life after football and how he made the difficult transition to the real world where there's not 80,000 fans cheering you as you interview for a job. That and much more in Part 1 of our sit-down with Robert.

Clemson's longtime and now semi-retired sports information director sits down with The Clemson Dubcast to share what his life is like now, the beginnings of Dabo Swinney's head-coaching career 10 years ago, the changing nature of press boxes, Dabo's famous rants, and much more.

Gene Sapakoff, longtime sports columnist for The Post and Courier of Charleston, recounts anectodes from three decades of covering college football in the Palmetto State. He also shares how he discovered that Dabo Swinney played a role in the start of a now-popular Bundt cake franchise. That and much more in our interview of South Carolina's longest-tenured newspaper sports columnist.

Sitting down with Ben Boulware, the heart and soul of Clemson's 2016 national title team. Boulware discusses how he coped with being cut by the Panthers and 49ers, and how he quickly shifted to starting his own business. Boulware, who runs The Junkyard fitness center in Anderson, talks about the small but crucial differences between the 2015 and 2016 teams and how he wasn't going to let the latter group fall victim to the same distractions as the team that fell five points short in the national title game. That and much, much more in this lengthy conversation from the lobby of his fitness center.

Larry Williams, entering his 11th season as senior writer at Tigerillustrated.com, introduces you to the Clemson Dubcast. Williams, who started covering the Tigers when Dabo Swinney was a second-year receivers coach in 2004, takes you inside the helmet and inside the press box (minus the free food) to deliver the stories behind the stories. No screaming. No hot takes. No picks. Just honest insight and informed conversation. E-mail questions or interview ideas to [email protected].