Why Tommy Bowden prefers SEC over Big Ten for Clemson football if Tigers leave ACC

If his old school ever leaves the ACC, former Clemson football coach Tommy Bowden sees a natural landing spot for the Tigers amid the latest round of realignment.

“Geographically, historically and culturally, I just think they’d be a better fit in the SEC,” Bowden, who coached Clemson from 1999 to 2008, told The State. “It would just increase their marketability.”

Clemson is an ACC charter member, having competed in the conference since its 1953 conception in a hazy Greensboro hotel, but its athletic future has been a hot topic ever since Southern Cal and UCLA announced their move from the Pac-12 to the Big Ten two weeks ago. They’ll join the conference in 2024.

The Big Ten’s poaching of those two West Coast stalwarts came in direct response to the SEC’s June 2021 acquisition of Texas and Oklahoma (joining by 2025), and national reports have highlighted Clemson as another top expansion target for college football’s two soon-to-be mega-conferences.

Clemson will not comment on realignment reports, an athletics department spokesperson told The State last week.

Bowden, 68, said leaving the Atlantic Coast Conference was “never a point of discussion” during his Clemson tenure, which spanned athletic directors Bobby Robinson (1985-2002) and Terry Don Phillips (2002-12).

But he did get an extensive crash course in ACC and SEC tradition over his three decades in college football. Before leading Tulane for two seasons and Clemson for 10 seasons as a head coach, he spent the 1980s and ’90s traversing both conferences as an offensive assistant.

And his stints at Florida State, Duke, Alabama, Auburn (twice) and Kentucky — plus a decade coaching Clemson — revealed similarities between the Tigers and the football-rich conferences targeting them, per CBS Sports and Action Network reports.

“They’ve got the passion, the fanaticism, the backing and the commitment from the administration,” Bowden said, “all the things that most of those SEC schools have.”

Naturally, environment is a selling point. Clemson’s Memorial Stadium, also known as Death Valley, is the ACC’s largest stadium and country’s 15th largest stadium in terms of seating capacity at 81,500. Playing there, the Tigers have finished top 20 nationally in home attendance for 41 consecutive seasons.

Gamedays in Clemson, Bowden said, were comparable to his dozens of SEC road trips to classic venues such as Georgia, LSU, Florida and Texas A&M as an assistant, as well as the Tigers’ occasional meetings with SEC teams and annual rivalry game with South Carolina.

“Clemson, you’re playing in front of 80,000,” Bowden said. “Unfortunately for the ACC, you didn’t have that passion, that following and that enthusiasm (everywhere). You’d go to Wake Forest, and it’s 17,000 people. You’d go to Duke, and there’s 12,000.”

The Tigers’ raucous home environment has reached a fever pitch over the last decade under coach Dabo Swinney, who replaced Bowden as interim coach after he resigned six games through the 2009 season and has held the post ever since.

Clemson has appeared in six of the eight all-time College Football Playoffs since 2014, advanced to the national championship game four times and won two national championships. The team has also won six of the last seven ACC football titles and 10-plus games in 11 straight seasons.

“Their talent level is on par” with the SEC, Bowden said, while acknowledging the move would present “a little bit more of a difficult challenge in the week-to-week opponents” for Clemson.

An administrative commitment to football success would also work in Clemson’s favor, Bowden said. Gone are the days of him losing Clemson assistant coaches to SEC schools. Outside of making Swinney one of the country’s top paid head coaches, the Tigers now pay assistants at a nationally competitive rate (see: former star coordinators Tony Elliott and Brent Venables).

Clemson University has also shown a willingness to invest in the program through various stadium, football complex and practice facility upgrades and the third largest total football operating budget in the country for fiscal year 2020-21 ($47.9 million, per Sportico, only trailing No. 1 Alabama and No. 2 Auburn).

As for recruiting? Clemson is already a force in the Southeast (its 2023 class ranks No. 3, per 247Sports composite rankings), and adding the SEC moniker would be a “huge asset,” Bowden said. “It would just make them even stronger in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee. They recruit there anyway.”

The longtime coach has his doubts about the direction of college football, especially how a consolidated mega-conference setup could widen the gap between the “haves and the haves nots” and squeeze out smaller programs such as Tulane, where he coached two seasons.

But if Clemson makes a move in a sports world where TV deals means everything and Alliances mean nothing, Bowden’s past experience tells him the SEC’s the spot.

“The quality of staff and the commitment to facilities, Clemson has them,” he said. “They’ve proven that. They’ve got the intangibles and the talent to go in there. I think they’d fare well.”