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CLEMSON -- A half hour after Pittsburgh sucked the soul out of Clemson's football team on Oct. 23, the possibilities seemed limitless for the Tigers.
And we're talking the bad variety of possibilities.
The team tried the circle-the-wagons thing entering the game, saying all their goals were still intact and railing against an outside world that had cast them to the scrap heap.
But this 27-17 loss made things different. It dropped the team to 4-3. It brought a cold splash of the inescapable reality that this team simply was not going to be in play to match or come close to the standards set by its highly accomplished predecessors.
It made it totally reasonable to wonder if things might go off the rails like they do at a lot of other places when bad results and bad vibes start accumulating.
So it was fair, in the immediate aftermath of that loss, to ask the coaches how they were going to hold everything together with most of the typical goals washed away.