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Philip Florenzo had snapped tons of times without issue. Clean, quiet, automatic. That’s the life of a long snapper — best when you’re invisible.
But late in Clemson’s nail-biter against Louisville, with the crowd buzzing and everything on the line, the ball skipped off the turf. Not by much, but enough to make punter Jack Smith have to scoop it and stumble to his right, falling to the ground—enough for Florenzo to jog off the field with a pit opening in his stomach.
“Someone told me that, yeah, like you’re benched,” he said this week. “I was kind of like, what? This is how it ends?”
Unsure of his status, he kept warming up in whatever space he could find on a crowded sideline. “It’s kind of hard on a cramped sideline to snap a ball 15 yards because everybody seems to be standing in the way,” he said. “But yeah, that’s what I was doing.”
Eventually, word trickled through the chaos. Coach Dabo Swinney wanted him back in. Timeout. Florenzo was found. He jogged over, unsure what to expect.
Then came the message: “Throw a freaking dart,” Swinney noted in his postgame press conference.
Florenzo recalled Swinney's pep talk from Tuesday, “I was like, ‘Thank God I didn’t get fired.’”
He did just that—snapped a beauty, flipped the field, and helped Clemson hang on for a 20–19 win. Just another punt in the box score, but to Florenzo, it meant something more.
Redemption.
But back to the snap that started it all, a near-fatal blow, Florenzo said, was simply a rare miss.
“It’s just a fluke play,” he said. “It’s kind of like whiffing on a golf shot somehow. You do everything right, you do the same process. There’s no nerves. Done it over 300 times. Just lined up, did the normal process I did, and I released it too early.”
Still, he never hesitated about stepping back out there.
“I never lost confidence in myself through the whole process,” Florenzo said. “I was ready to go do it again. I was excited about doing it again.”
Long snapping wasn’t always the plan. It started almost by accident. “It happened the first day of my senior practice,” he said. “We need a long snapper… I wanted to get out of practice a little bit and hang out.”
A coach with NFL experience noticed. “He said, hey, you’re pretty good at this long snapping thing,” Florenzo said. The former pro told him he had six years in the NFL and a Super Bowl ring as a long snapper — and that Florenzo was better than he had been. “Once he said that and I kind of saw the vision for it, he sold me right there,” he said.
A string of school visits eventually led him to Clemson. The first trip included a full campus tour. The second was more spontaneous, just him and his dad driving in to see the place again. “I just felt the energy of the place,” he said. He remembers discovering the lake near campus for the first time and grabbing food at Loose Change. “It all just kind of stuck in my brain and my heart that this was an amazing place and I just felt pulled to it.”
Getting a chance to join the team required persistence — and a lucky encounter during a restaurant shift. “I was a server,” he said. An alum approached him and asked about his sports background, which led to a conversation about long snapping and his dream of walking on. The alum offered to help. “I can write a letter to [Jim] Clements kind of explaining your story,” Florenzo recalled.
Soon after, the opportunity arrived. “I got an email that night about the tryout date,” he said. “I just wanted an opportunity to try out.”
He made the most of it, earning his spot in a way that surprised even him. “He told me like, hey man, pretty good tryout,” Florenzo said of Swinney. “And he said, just so you know, you made the team. When I heard that I didn’t believe it.”
Since then, he’s carved out a role.
“I get one, maybe one play a game,” he said. “If we’re having a bad game, I get eight and people start booing me being out there.”
He treats every rep as a chance to contribute. “I want to make the most impact I can,” he said. “I want to make an impact for this team and this program.”
Asked for his favorite memory, he didn’t choose a rivalry game or big moment. He picked his first snap.
“It’s UConn in 2021,” he said. “My first snap ever… it was like the biggest play of my life.” He remembers looking up and seeing his parents recording the extra point. “People probably look at them like they’re crazy,” he said. “That was probably one of my most cherished memories.”
With two games left, he knows his college career is nearing the finish line. “I believe I gave everything I had to Clemson and I have no regrets,” he said.
But he also wouldn’t mind one last moment. “If he [Swinney] wants to let me play on my final senior day, just give me a little halfback toss or something,” he said. “See what happens.”
Until then, he’ll keep doing the job no one notices—until they do.
And when the moment comes again?
He’ll be ready to throw a dart.
