Credit Clemson QB Cade Klubnik for who he is instead of judging him for who he’s not
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Has any football player arrived on campus with more hype and fanfare only to spend the best season of his career flying as far below the radar as Cade Klubnik has this year?
If there is, the list is as short as that of Dabo Swinney’s transfer portal additions.
The Clemson star has put up the kind of numbers you’d expect from the top-rated quarterback prospect in his class. Which he was, according to almost every major recruiting service, in 2021.
He has thrown for 3,303 yards. He’s 1 of only 4 FBS passers this season to throw for 30 or more touchdowns, with only 5 interceptions. And he’s led his team to a conference championship and a spot in the College Football Playoff.
Klubnik’s 2024 performance to date has been comparable to this year’s Heisman runner-up Dillon Gabriel and 2020 ACC Player of the Year Trevor Lawrence – a former Clemson star who was chosen No. 1 in the NFL Draft.
And yet, Klubnik’s name was nowhere to be found on the ACC’s 3 all-conference teams or among the top 10 of the Heisman voting.
Some of that can be chalked up to Clemson fatigue among those in an expanded ACC, the conference’s sagging reputation nationally and the fact that the Tigers are no longer the dominant force they were only a few years ago.
A more likely explanation is the standard against which Klubnik is being measured.
Conventional wisdom suggests that the bar should be low considering that he replaced the wildly inconsistent DJ Uiagalelei, who was essentially run out of town after being benched in favor of Klubnik in the 2022 ACC Championship Game.
Instead, expectations have been raised even higher.
It’s not as if Klubnik is viewed as a disappointment. He’s a 2-time ACC title game MVP who ranks among the top 5 in school history in passing yardage, completion percentage and touchdowns. And he’s done it with a receiving corps that until this year has left something to be desired.
He’s just not Trevor Lawrence. Or Deshaun Watson.
No, he’s not.
Watson is in a class by himself. He won a natty and is the only Clemson QB to throw for 4,000 yards — and he did it twice. But the comparison to Lawrence, at least statistically, isn’t as 1-sided it might seem.
Klubnik’s 3,303 passing yards, 33 touchdowns and .637 completion percentage this season are comparable to the numbers put up by Lawrence when he threw for 3,153 yards and 24 touchdowns with a .652 percentage during the COVID-shortened year he was voted the ACC’s best player.
The biggest difference is team success.
Lawrence carried the Tigers to a national championship as a freshman in 2018 and back to the Playoff final 2 years later; Klubnik’s teams have struggled to remain on the fringe of national relevance. Clemson’s 3 losses in 2024 are as many as Lawrence’s teams suffered in his 3 seasons combined.
And yet, when the Tigers take on Texas in the opening round of the newly expanded Playoff on Saturday, they’ll be 1 of only 12 teams still in the running for this year’s national championship.
It’s an opportunity they wouldn’t have earned without the heroics of an underappreciated quarterback blessed with the clutch gene.
Clemson’s Playoff hopes were on life support at best until Klubnik turned a quarterback draw into a dramatic game-winning 50-yard touchdown run with just over a minute remaining at Pittsburgh on Nov. 16. Then, after getting an unexpected reprieve following a late loss to rival South Carolina, Klubnik seized the moment again by throwing 4 touchdown passes in a victory against SMU that earned the Tigers their 8th ACC crown in the past 10 years.
“The heart, the belief, the grit … it’s just different,” Swinney said after the Pittsburgh game. “That’s what makes Cade and this team championship-caliber.”
You can remove “caliber” from that statement now that Klubnik and his teammates have delivered another ACC title.
But that’s not the kind of championship that sets players apart at Clemson.
At +2000, according to ESPNBet sportsbook, the Tigers have the longest odds in the field to reach the title game in Atlanta on Jan. 20. And they’re an 11.5-point underdog against the Longhorns on Saturday.
The game represents a homecoming for Klubnik, who starred at Westlake High, the noted QB factory in Austin that produced Drew Brees and Nick Foles. If he gets the best of Texas quarterback Quinn Ewers as he did in the 2021 6A state championship game and passes his team into the next round, it might be the first step toward getting the recognition he deserves.
And finally being appreciated for who he is instead of being compared to someone he’s not.
Award-winning columnist Brett Friedlander has covered the ACC and college basketball since the 1980s.
