If Clemson is to win the national title this season, the Tigers will have to accomplish something that hasn't happened since half his roster was in diapers.
Though it may seem like the loser of the previous year's national title game may be a sure bet to win the following year's national championship -- talented team plus unfinished business pushing their nose to the grindstone -- it rarely works out that way. No runner-up has returned to the national title game since Ohio State in 2006-07, and those Buckeyes lost both games. The last team to avenge a championship game loss with a victory a year later came back in 1998-99, when Florida State followed a loss to Tennessee in the inaugural BCS championship game by finishing a wire-to-wire No. 1 season by downing Michael Vick's Virginia Tech club in the Sugar Bowl.
And those Seminoles didn't have to win an extra game against a top-4 team just to get to New Orleans.
The runner-up-turned-champion phenomenon happens in other sports, though it is rare. The defending World Series champion Kansas City Royals avenged a 2014 Fall Classic loss. The 2013-14 San Antonio Spurs climbed that mountain, as did the 2011-12 Miami Heat and the 2008-09 Los Angeles Lakers. Other than that, though? Good luck. A losing team hasn't returned to win the next year's Super Bowl since the 1971-72 Miami Dolphins. In college basketball, only 1997-98 Kentucky has done the same in the last 30 years.
Sure, those are different sports with different challenges, but the point remains the same: if you run a marathon only to come up a step short of the gold medal, you don't start the next one at mile 26. You have to go all the way back to the starting line. Everything that went right last time -- new players stepping up and returning players improving, avoiding catastrophic injury and just plain bad luck, finding something in the reserve tank when you need to dip in there -- has to go right again, and then some.
Dabo Swinney knows this.
"Without the consistency we had the last five, six years, everyone would just kind of say, well, they had a good year," Swinney told Stewart Mandel of Fox Sports. "They had a good team. I don't want to have a great team, I want to have a great program."
Clemson opens at Auburn, a program that has spent the last half-decade as a grenade that alternately blows up in the opponent's foxhole or its own hand. Last season was one of the latter years. There is no return trip to Notre Dame, which means one less opportunity for a loss but also one less bullet point to add to the resume to counterbalance a loss elsewhere. And there is a visit to Doak Campbell Stadium, a field no one currently wearing orange and purple has ever won.
None of that, nor the long line of trends he must break to take Clemson to that final step on the journey. Swinney stands at the starting line, ready to run.
"The game's not played on paper," Swinney said. "If it was, I would go to midfield, I'd meet up with the other coach, I'd show him my recruiting stats, my Xs and Os, the crowd would ooh and aah, and they'd declare a winner.
"Most people focus on what's gone. I don't control that. I control who's here. I know the talent we have on our roster."