Midseason eye test
CLEMSON -- At one point during Saturday night's broadcast, ESPN's Sean McDonough and Todd Blackledge began evaluating the big picture for the top teams in college football.
When McDonough brought up Clemson, the broadcast duo agreed that there is zero question about the Tigers' Top 5 credentials.
Who knows what happens from this point forward in a college football season that has been even more bonkers than usual.
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But the fact that Clemson is firmly in that elite class halfway through the regular season is a pretty heady development here in a year that was widely framed as a crossroads season for Dabo Swinney.
We never totally bought into that crossroads idea, by the way. Because it seems a tad overheated to suggest Swinney's program will never get back to the top if it finishes, say, 10-3 for the second year in a row.
But his 14th year was unquestionably important because of the rare major turnover on his staff, and the decisions he made to fill those vacancies.
Well here we are halfway through, and it seems that in some ways the most intense scrutiny of this team comes from within its own fan base.
Not that there's something horribly wrong or extraordinary about that: When you closely follow one team, you tend to obsess more over that team's warts and you're more prone to ignorance of warts shown elsewhere by the supposedly elite teams.
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