Last year, Clemson athletic director Graham Neff and football coach Dabo Swinney made it clear: They had no interest in hosting South Carolina on Black Friday.
But the ACC will keep trying to make it happen, according to a top official.
During a wide-ranging interview with The State, ACC senior associate commissioner for football Michael Strickland said the conference remains interested in having Clemson play in-state rival USC on Black Friday at some point.
But that’s no different from how the league feels about other schools, he added.
“Our job is to try to find ways to maximize opportunities for each individual school and, at the same time, work for the collective good of the ACC,” Strickland said.
Clemson’s resistance to hosting a game on Black Friday made headlines last summer when a court filing revealed the ACC and ESPN had asked the school to move its 2024 home game against the Gamecocks from Saturday, Nov. 30, to Friday, Nov. 29.
Strickland — who has worked for the ACC since 2013 and is commissioner Jim Phillips’ top assistant on all football matters — was right in the middle of those talks.
As part of a batch of documents intended to show the influence the ACC exercised over Clemson, school lawyers included an email from Strickland outlining to Neff how the conference was “disappointed” Clemson had “refused” to move the game.
Strickland wrote that the ACC and ESPN had secured various scheduling “concessions” for Clemson if it agreed to the change, including an agreement for South Carolina to also host Clemson in a Black Friday game in the future (and as early as the 2025 season).
USC officials also confirmed to The State last year they were “interested” in hosting Clemson on Black Friday at Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia. But they dropped the idea after being told Clemson didn’t want to reciprocate.
“As all ACC members know, it is incumbent upon the ACC and its institutions to work in good faith with ESPN on football scheduling issues,” Strickland wrote in an email dated May 7, 2024. “This cooperation maximizes the value of our relationship with our media partner and strengthens our collective future. Clemson’s decision not to do so in this instance is harmful toward that goal.”
Clemson football has appeared in a number of non-Saturday games, but those games have come almost exclusively on the road or at a neutral site. The school is not incapable of hosting a non-Saturday game — Clemson hosted Thursday games in 2013 and 2019 at Memorial Stadium — but those sorts of games can put a logistical strain on the university and the city, The State previously reported.
Swinney has also cited holiday travel impacts for teams and fans.
Why the ACC is interested in Clemson-USC on Black Friday
Strickland declined to elaborate on the ACC’s conversations with Clemson last year, but he complimented Georgia Tech for saying yes to the same opportunity.
Georgia Tech and Georgia agreed to move their 2024 rivalry game in Athens from Saturday Nov. 30 to Friday Nov. 29, and UGA won in a thrilling, eight-overtime night game. This year’s Georgia-Georgia Tech game (a GT home game being played at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta) has also been moved to Black Friday.
The 2024 and 2025 Clemson-South Carolina games theoretically would’ve followed the same schedule, had both schools separately agreed to move their home games.
The Clemson home game would’ve been in primetime (the 7:30 p.m. ABC slot).
“We talk with our schools all the time about scheduling opportunities, and sometimes it works for schools, and sometimes it doesn’t,” Strickland said in an interview. “Georgia Tech was eager to sign up for that opportunity, and they played a classic ball game. Just came up one second or one point shy, and Georgia Tech will reap a number of benefits from that for a number of years.”
Ratings from the 2024 Georgia-Georgia Tech game (which aired in the 7:30 p.m. ABC slot) will be factored into the TV ratings the ACC now uses to distribute additional money to schools with the highest football/basketball viewership.
“So I applaud Georgia Tech for being willing to do that,” Strickland said, adding that the ACC has scheduling conversations “all the time, and we have enough teams that if we ask the right people at the right time enough, we’ll fill all those spots.”
Given the exposure Georgia Tech and other ACC schools have generated playing on Black Friday, would he like to see Clemson do the same at Death Valley?
“What I hope happens is that the ACC finds a way to maximize all of our exposure opportunities,” Strickland said. “And if there are windows available on ABC or ESPN in an exclusive manner, I hope we fill them.”
“Just like I don’t care which ACC teams win or lose games, or who wins our championship, I just want the opportunities and the rewards to flow to an ACC member,” Strickland added. “So if it’s Clemson, great. If it’s not, and it’s somebody else that gets to benefit from that opportunity, that’s great as well.”