The Clemson Dubcast

Tony Ciuffo

After a life in Charleston that included 20 years working with John Kresse and Bobby Cremins at College of Charleston, Tony Ciuffo and his wife were looking to retire somewhere.

They chose Clemson, where Ciuffo is now working in a broadcasting role with various Tigers sports.

Ciuffo's son Nick was once an elite high school baseball player who went in the first round of the 2013 MLB Draft and is now in the Yankees organization.

Nick received his first college offer (from South Carolina) before he even played a high school game.

Tony is also close with Monte Lee, who coached at Charleston before taking the Clemson job.

Ciuffo serves on the South Carolina Athletic Hall of Fame, whose president is former Clemson administrator Bill D'Andrea.

 

Graham Neff, Myles Murphy, Joseph Ngata

Three days ago, Graham Neff sat down with reporters and put his full support behind Brad Brownell while declaring Brownell will be back for a 14th season.

That stance is now the target of criticism after Clemson's embarrassing loss to Morehead State in the first round of the NIT.

With many wondering whether Neff might walk back some of his comments, or even reconsider his stance on Brownell's return, we provide the full audio of his conversation with a small group of media including Tigerillustrated.com.

Also, Myles Murphy and Joseph Ngata were full of nostalgia when they returned to Clemson earlier this week for Pro Day.

Both are now reminded of the wisdom Dabo Swinney often dispenses to his players, that the college years will always be the most cherished time of their lives.

Ngata stopped short of saying he made the wrong decision in declaring for the NFL, but he did seem to be experiencing some misgivings about the feeling of coming back and no longer being a part of the program.

We present the full interviews from Murphy and Ngata after Pro Day.

Tod and Cade Klubnik

In late December, we had a lengthy interview with the father of Cade Klubnik for more background on Cade's upbringing, his extraordinary competitiveness, and his love of Clemson.

Tod Klubnik and his wife Kim are frequent visitors to Clemson as they travel from Austin across the country in the RV purchased after Tod's retirement.

Tod shares what it was like for Cade last season looking on as the offense struggled late in the season with DJ Uiagalelei at the controls.

We also present the entirety of Cade's recent press conference as he and Clemson's offense begin learning the system of first-year offensive coordinator Garrett Riley.

Cade is genuinely excited about the new direction, which will bring much more simplicity as the playbook is pared down significantly from the previous eras under Brandon Streeter, Tony Elliott and Jeff Scott.

 

Jack Leggett

Jack Leggett will be back in Doug Kingsmore Stadium tonight, back facing bitter rival South Carolina in a three-game weekend series.

Leggett is asked what he'd say to Gamecocks athletics director Ray Tanner and South Carolina assistant Monte Lee if their paths cross this weekend.

"Probably not going to be a lot of conversation," he said.

Leggett says he has nothing against Lee, who replaced him as head coach in 2015, or Tanner. 

Yet he said he had a good relationship with Tanner for years until Dan Radakovich consulted with Tanner when evaluating whether to retain or fire Leggett.

Leggett said he received hundreds of text messages from people in the coaching and athletics industry after his firing from Clemson, but he didn't receive any correspondence from Tanner and still hasn't heard from him.

Leggett goes into detail on his return to Clemson as the Director of Program Development under first-year coach Erik Bakich, a part-time role.

NCAA compliance prevents him from coaching, and he admits that makes him uncomfortable because coaching is in his blood and is what he wants to do.

He says he's not sure whether this stint will last beyond this season, but he says he's thoroughly enjoying being back in the dugout and within the program he guided for so long, and to so much success.

 

Nic Brown

By age 22, Nic Brown had achieved rock-music stardom.

 

As the drummer in the band Athenaeum, a group that initially came together for a middle-school dance when Brown was in the eighth grade, he was touring the country and sharing the stage with major acts including the Foo Fighters.

 

From the outside, the trajectory for this pop-rock band seemed limitless as it had already enjoyed one of its songs rising to No. 14 on the charts.

 

And that's when Brown decided to quit the band and move to New York to pursue a career in creative writing.

 

Brown, now an associate professor of creative writing at Clemson, joins the podcast to discuss his recently-published memoir Bang Bang Crash.

 

Over the last nine years of living in Clemson, Brown almost never played the drums and was uncomfortable even discussing his musical past when it came up in conversation socially.

 

But writing the book, and now talking about it, brought self-discovery to the point that Brown is back to playing the drums again at his family's home near Clemson's campus.

 

Brown is the author of the novels In Every Way, Doubles, and Floodmarkers, which was selected as an Editors' Choice by The New York Times Book Review. 

 

He is the fiction editor of the South Carolina Review, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Oxford American, and the Harvard Review, among many other publications. 

 

A graduate of Columbia University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has served as the Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.

The Cheap Seats turns 20

A few weeks before Clemson's 2003 baseball season began, a group of students sat in their apartment and one of the guys was skimming classified ads looking for interesting things for sale.

He came across this ad:

"Bus. $400 with spare engine."

The idea was hatched to buy the bus and turn it into a tailgating machine.

Twenty years later, the bus is a fixture beyond the right-field fence at Doug Kingsmore Stadium.

Garrett Edens, president of The Cheap Seats, joins the podcast to dig into the rollicking, irreverent, passionate history of the people who have made this a ritual during every home baseball weekend.

They stand on top of a bus and drink beer, talk good-natured smack to opposing outfielders, and watch every pitch in every game featuring their beloved Tigers.

Some people view sporting events as a social event, taking occasional glances at the action unfolding on the field. The inhabitants of The Cheap Seats are the purists.

Athletics departments spend a lot of time and money trying to create magnetic home-field atmospheres. But sometimes, vital features of extraordinary game-day settings are not manufactured and occur organically. They gradually build attachment and magnetism by doing the same thing year after year after year, to the point that the people involved can't imagine doing it any other way -- and the people watching from afar can't imagine a Clemson baseball setting without The Cheap Seats.

J.C. Harper

J.C. Harper remembers growing up in Clemson as the son of iconic assistant coach Tom Harper, the architect of the Tigers' rampaging defensive lines in the 1980s.

At Daniel High School, J.C. attracted attention from recruiters and Georgia's Vince Dooley began appearing at his games. After committing to the Bulldogs, J.C. braced himself for his father's reaction.

"Son, did you commit to Georgia?"

"Yes sir."

"Why?"

"Because Coach Dooley came to two of my games."

"Son, I came to all of your games."

"But you're my dad. You're supposed to do that."

J.C. ended up switching to Clemson after a long car ride with Danny Ford, and all these years later he still treasures his memories from those days.

He also has a connection with current Clemson offensive coordinator Garrett Riley, a quarterback who transferred to Stephen F. Austin when J.C. was the head coach of the Lumberjacks.

Riley helped Harper install the Air Raid offense that Mike Leach popularized at nearby Texas Tech.

Harper has been out of coaching for the better part of a decade, but he still loves talking about the old days that include stints as an assistant under Lou Holtz at Notre Dame and Mack Brown at North Carolina.

Harper lives in Lake Charles, La., with his family and works in real estate.

 

Ron Green Jr.

Ron Green Jr. doesn't need an introduction to Michael Jordan. He covered Jordan as a writer for the student newspaper at North Carolina when Jordan was in Chapel Hill.

Green has been around a long time -- long enough to have covered Danny Ford during Clemson's first golden era, to have developed a relationship with Tiger Woods, and to have played golf with Donald Trump long before Trump became President.

"He picked up a five-foot putt and said it was a gimme," Green said. "I said: 'You know I've never seen you miss one of those. I've also never seen you putt one of those.'"

Green, one of the great sportswriting stylists of the newspaper era, has managed to continue making a living after leaving The Charlotte Observer 11 years ago.

He travels the world as a writer for the Global Golf Post. At the upcoming Masters Tournament, he will receive the PGA of America's Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism.

Green is the 32nd recipient of the award. His 93-year-old father, Ron Green Sr., won the award in 2006 for his own golf coverage and was a longtime Observer sports columnist. They are the first father-son duo to separately win the award.

Green Jr., 66, worked at The Charlotte Observer for 23 years. He got to know Ford, Clemson's legendary coach, while working in Greenville as a sportswriter covering the Tigers in the 1980s.

Green Jr. says he dearly misses covering big college football and basketball games in the ACC, but he wonders where college sports is headed in the age of NIL and the transfer portal.

Green Jr. still covers about 15 pro golf tournaments per year. He has covered about 100 of golf's majors, including 41 Masters tournaments.

 

Ruffin McNeill and Greg McElroy

Ruffin McNeill is basically like family to Garrett Riley and Lincoln Riley, so with Dabo Swinney's major hire of TCU's former offensive coordinator McNeill had a lot to say about Garrett and his history with him.

In the mid-1980s, McNeill got his start in college coaching as a grad assistant for Clemson under Danny Ford. He considers those years two of the most formative of his entire career coaching football.

Greg McElroy of ESPN covered Clemson's final game of 2022, a dispiriting loss to Tennessee in the Orange Bowl in which the offense put up a bunch of yards but reached the end zone just one time.

McElroy gives his own take on the Riley acquisition, and the state of Clemson football not just after two years of the Tigers not reaching the playoff, but amid Georgia's rise to dominance.

McElroy believes it's time for Swinney to totally step away from the offense and hand the keys totally to Riley.

"It's time for him to take a knee," McElroy said.

 

 

Todd Dodge and Jay Mathews

Todd Dodge is firmly in the inner circle of Cade Klubnik, and the same is true of Jay Mathews and Christopher Vizzina.

Dodge and Mathews were featured prominently in the recent series of articles at Tigerillustrated.com exploring the backgrounds of Clemson's two highly regarded quarterbacks.

This podcast presents the raw audio from the interviews of those two figures, conducted in late December.

Dodge, now retired, was a legendary Texas high school coach who completed his career at Westlake High School in Austin.

Mathews is the athletics director and quarterbacks coach at Briarwood Christian in Birmingham.