ISD Insider John Brice: "Clemson is a national brand now, too"
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We sat down with our good friend John Brice from IrishSportsDaily.com to get some insight into the Fighting Irish. Here are a few quick notes, plus the full audio above.
On what he’s seen from Clemson so far:
"First of all, they've had the best player in college football all season long in Trevor Lawrence and really a preeminent player in college football for three years now, who would have been a top-five pick a year ago, if not the No. 1 overall pick. Now it appears D.J. is set to give them that type of player for the future to come."
On what’s been built in Clemson:
"So what Dabo has done, once he turned the corner-- what Clemson has done really better than anybody in the country is build depth everywhere on its football roster. And to me, that's what separates Clemson-- it's why Clemson is a threat to win a national championship and has been a threat to be the national champion every single year for the last several years in a row."
On Trevor Lawrence being out:
"It was huge news, and it was the talk. You could hear people, even through their masks at the grocery store talking about Clemson, doesn't have its quarterback and things of that nature. But honestly, what I think it does is it really places tremendous pressure on Notre Dame. Notre Dame is going to get a still incredibly good Clemson football team. But once again, Notre Dame gets a game at home against a powerhouse team with a quarterback who's a freshman making his first career road start. They had that in 2017 when Jake Fromm and Georgia visited up here, and Notre Dame couldn't close out that game. So I think Notre Dame has a lot of pressure to find a way to get a win Saturday and has to find a way to play really well to do so."
On the lost impact of being on NBC now vs. years ago:
"Honestly, I think that that's something that Notre Dame is had to adjust to-- and maybe was a little bit slow to adjust to, in some of its recruiting efforts. Look, Notre Dame is a national brand. Yes, and it has been for a really long time. But Clemson is a national brand now too. The Tigers dominate recruiting in a lot of regions of the South. But Clemson can absolutely walk into any high school in America and land any recruit that it wants to land. I think that's been a big part of things for Clemson-- for an Alabama-- for some of these other programs that the network television, the launch of the ACC Network, the SEC Network, all of these things have diminished an advantage that Notre Dame once had, where every single game, every single week was going to be a national television game. If Notre Dame wasn't playing a home game on NBC, then it was going to be a national TV game on ABC against Michigan or Southern Cal or somebody like that. That's just not the reality that's being lived in anymore."
