Jadeveon Clowney doesn’t hate Clemson. He just doesn’t want them to beat South Carolina
Tajh Boyd can probably still feel the hurt that Jadeveon Clowney put him through for three seasons. The Clemson great won 32 games as a starting quarterback. At the end of each regular season, however, there was that team in garnet and black on the schedule. There was South Carolina’s big defensive end. Michael Myers wearing No. 7. Someone who terrorized Boyd three times.
Clowney — who now plays for the NFL’s Carolina Panthers — told The State last that he’s talked to Boyd a few times over the past decade but admitted, “(We’re) not like homeboys or nothin.’ ” They reminisce about their college fotball battles in the early 2010s, all of which went the way of Clowney and South Carolina. The Gamecocks won by double-digits in every Palmetto Bowl that Clowney played in (2011, ‘12 and ’13) with the future top-overall pick sacking Boyd 6.5 times.
“Bro,” Clowney said Boyd tells him, “you got the best of me during those times.” Even a dozen years later, Clowney’s 4.5-sack performance in the 2012 Clemson game still lives in South Carolina lore. If it weren’t for Clowney executing perhaps the greatest hit in college football history a month later in the Outback Bowl, that 2012 performance against the Tigers might lead his collegiate highlight reel. “I just remember busting them up,” Clowney said of that game. And, well, South Carolina got the best of Clemson. But the tide has turned since Clowney and Boyd graduated in 2013, with the Tigers winning every Palmetto Bowl since, save for 2022. And for a chunk of Clemson’s seven-game winning streak over South Carolina, Clowney was playing for the Houston Texans, sharing a locker room with former Clemson stars DeAndre Hopkins and Deshaun Watson. Often, Clowney said, they’d make friendly wagers on the game, which meant the former Gamecock would have to walk around wearing a Clemson jersey.
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