CLEMSON -- A vast and startling sea of maroon seats was the enduring memory from Florida State's mid-January basketball victory over Pittsburgh.
And, in general across major college athletics, the enduring fear of what happens when your product takes a downward turn.
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Attracting butts to seats, and keeping them there, has always been a challenge.
But probably never greater than now.
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The cheaper comforts of a couch and a TV have been a threat for a while.
Paying to watch paid talent that you'd never heard of until, oh, last week can bring the perfect quiet, apathetic storm of games being played in front of empty seats.
It's February of 2025 and we certainly aren't going to pretend to know everything about where college athletics stands and where it's all headed.
Some of you might say the present model is unsustainable and maybe even doomed.
And fair enough, to each his own.
But we can certainly say we know enough to say this:
Whatever form and shape this all takes moving forward, a successful product will still be a highly marketable product because fans will always love watching their team win.
But the inverse of that seems dire:
In the age of pay for play and the transfer portal, fans are going to be much quicker to bail if their teams are struggling.
Given this backdrop, what's going on right now at Clemson should be celebrated and probably even studied by those who are looking for the optimum long-term formula.
Including Florida State, which went ahead and announced this 23rd season for Leonard Hamilton will be his last amid the Seminoles stinking up their own empty joint and others.
When Brad Brownell was hired at Clemson to replace Oliver Purnell, Dabo Swinney had coached 14 games as the non-interim head coach.
Swinney is now preparing for his 17th full season. He has played for the national championship four times and won two. His 2025 team is in the conversation for another one after skeptics spent years saying he was forever out of that conversation thanks to his roster-management model.
A year after Mike Norvell's model won the referendum against Swinney in overtime before a packed house at Death Valley, the FSU coach had to give back $4.5 million of his salary thanks to a 2-win season that would probably be an insult to dumpster fires to tag it with that label.
Take Swinney's adapting on the pay-for-play and portal fronts and combine it with the decisions to hire big assistant names from the outside, and this will probably go down as the Dabo 2.0 era of his tenure.
But we're already well into the Brownell 2.0 slice of his reign, and it's looking darned pretty here in his 15th season and Clemson sitting at 18-4 and 10-1 in the ACC.
Football's retention was a major story in December and January.
And as we evaluate the anatomy of Brownell's team managing to thrive after losing PJ Hall, Joe Girard, RJ Godfrey and Jack Clark from last year's Elite Eight run, we probably haven't spent enough time discussing the vital retention that happened last spring and summer.
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Yeah, Godfrey's departure for Georgia was a big loss and this team misses his presence.
But the guys who remained are a pretty big deal too, and we're not talking about just Chase Hunter and Ian Schieffelin. How about Chase's brother Dillon? How about Chauncey Wiggins?
In recent weeks this group has witnessed what happens when fans bail on teams.
Ten months ago N.C. State was in the Final Four but the atmosphere this past Saturday in Raleigh wasn't what you'd call threatening with the Wolfpack falling to 2-8 in the ACC.
Cassell Coliseum has been known to be raucous. Nothing close to that in late January when Clemson went there and gritted through for a win over Virginia Tech.
And tonight's opponent, Georgia Tech, didn't have much of a home-court advantage Jan. 14 when the Tigers went there and won by 11 in front of a bunch of empty seats.
Brownell has a number of guys who have been at Clemson a long time, been through the wars.
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That helps when you're going on the road in the ACC and need to dig deep during some adverse late-game situations.
It also helps you avoid the scenes we've seen at increasingly more basketball arenas and football stadiums as a more transactional era has led to more fans opting out of attending games.
If you build a program the right way, they will come.
If your formula goes awry and you're not winning, they will leave. And quickly.
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