http://espn.go.com/blog/ncfnation/post/_/id/127372/college-football-roun...
ACC: Clemson's Howard's Rock
They call it the most exciting 25 seconds in college football for a reason -- it's that cool. Clemson players and coaches touch Howard's Rock before every game and run down the hill into Memorial Stadium, with balloons being released into the sky as the school's fight song plays. Night games in Death Valley make the tradition all the more entertaining. We'd be remiss, though, to not also give a mention to Virginia Tech, as the Hokies' "Enter Sandman" entrance is pretty special too. -- Matt Fortuna
The Clemson vs. Virginia Tech vs. Florida State pregame tradition battle continues.
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Balloons and a rock!!!!! OMG ITS SO AMAZING!!!
I hear this year they are to release 100,000 frozen Madagascar butterflies.
So how does pregame tradition affect recruiting and thus performance on the field, or does it?
Clemson and FSU played in a National Championship in the last few years and VT hasn't. So I guess our intro isn't that great.
Maybe its just my homer perspective, but I have heard recruits talk about how awesome it will be to run on to Enter Sandman more than how much they want to follow an horse onto the field.
Unless, perhaps, if said horse is on a treadmill.
MAKE IT SO
INVENT THE FUTURE
Never got the awe of that Clemson tradition.
They rub a rock and run down a hill.
big. fucking. deal
This is probably where that tradition came from, good ole 70's crap
The guy made a million dollars!
Not disagreeing with you one bit, but we jump up, touch a rock, and run out of a tunnel.
Yeah, but ours has cool music
....There's also the 66k person mosh pit to Metallica during the whole thing....
I mean, literally, Clemson's is... Exit Locker room - hop on a bus at one side of the stadium - ride to the other side of the stadium - get off the bus - wait at the top of a hill - rub a rock - release balloons - run down the hill - fight song
Notice what isn't involved... the fans... Compare that to Lane
Exit Lockers - Enter tunnel from practice field - take tunnel under stadium - Wait - Enter Sandman - Fans go insane for 90 seconds - Cannon fires - Jump to touch stone - Run onto field - Fight song
Their entrance is a 1000 times more lame.
It was just funny how you wrote it, I could just see someone saying what I wrote about our entrance.
You forgot a big piece of the fan involvement...LETS GOOO!!!! HOKIES!!!!
Has anybody asked about the environmental impact about those released balloons?
I did read that this year they're moving to biodegradeable balloons, so at least they aren't polluting all over the place anymore.
#Balloongate2016
Memory, as usual these days, fails me as to the when, but I do remember one of our best years playing them in Clemson and taunting them as a team while they lined up to do the rock. C'mon down, our guys were gesturing and shouting...then we whupped 'em.
One thing I try to avoid, though, is belittling another team's traditions. The incessant and annoyingly condescending question from Texas fans at the '95 Sugar Bowl about "What's a Hokie?" made me a bit more sensitive in that regard. Enter Sandman is a relatively new phenomenon, I'll continue to respect more established traditions as we continue to build our own.
Enter Sandman won the reddit tournament for this last year. Then, a Clemson fan posted this article on there today and all the comments were about how VT's was better haha.
Anywho, I've been to so many Clemson games, it's totally underwhelming.
link?
https://www.reddit.com/r/CFB/comments/4n5eod/best_college_football_prega...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CFB/comments/380jzw/rcfb_entrances_tournament_c...
Memorial Stadium is lit, perhaps louder than Lane for your average game, but Howard's Rock is not nearly as stellar as Enter Sandman (Source: Been to two Clemson games against top 6 teams). As I understand it, Enter Sandman is 'relatively' new (10-15 years old?), while Howard's Rock has been around half a century - so maybe that accounts for some of the bias.
Bingo. I have been to many seasons worth of games at both stadiums and while Clemson's stadium tends to be a little bit louder (that's what 80,000+ in seating will do), when it comes to the specifics of the different traditions I think ours is way cooler.
BIngo, that's why it was so loud. I've been to many, many Clemson games and only recently they have been consistently loud, but they still don't stay loud all the way throughout games like Lane does or at least did during the good times. They got lit for some Gameday games and rivalry games but it's still not consistently loud throughout the game. I took some of my friends from the upstate of SC who were Clemson fans to the Kent State game in Lane in 2006, and they couldn't believe how loud it was for such an insignificant opponent. Plus, we were on the side of the field right in line with Brandon Flowers hit and they still talk about it whenever Lane gets brought up.
Clemson is very much the traditional, loud at the beginning, loud after big plays, loud on third down when it's close kind of fan base.
This guy's hilarious. His other tweets for your enjoyment:
"Doing a bunch of weird shit and promising it's not a cult"
HAHAHA, I love that. All of them are good
Trill is the best.
Sounds like they have good taste in cars in Indiana. My first car was a 97 Land Cruiser, those things run forever, incredible car.
Howard's rock was originally a doorstop. True fact
And the first wild bald eagle I ever saw came off of a roadkill in a ditch in Wyoming. Just sayin'
via GIPHY
i went to the Clemson vt game in 07 when Macho went off i sat front row and was not impressed at all with the whole rubbing the rock intro was not loud and had no music with it. very lame
I was at the last game where they returned the favor, but still lame to rub a rock
I don't get this either. I remember watching the opening on ESPN once within the last two or three years. They were trying to talk up the whole bus ride. I just did not grasp how any of that was the slightest bit entertaining, let alone exciting.
Apparently, the fans congregate on the field after every home game also. When Clemson beat FSU at home last year, the fans rushed the field. So I got into it on twitter with some Clemson fans. They never rush the field (yeah right, ok), but in fact congregate with players. And that is a tradition they claim also at the end of games.
Aside from my deep dislike and disgust for UVa and UT, Clemson sits at number three. The last time Clemson was at Lane, their fans were entirely obnoxious.
Clemson fans are the worst. Obnoxious and trashy.
Worse and more obnoxious and trashy than WVU fans?
Not that bad haha. Many of the older fans are very nice and pleasant to be around. It's the younger generation of fans that have tasted this success and they are very delusional and very, very disrespectful of other teams. They think they are a tried and true blue blood. I've said this before, the majority of Clemson fans I know were fully expecting to wax Alabama, I saw 20+ point win predictions from many people. They said things like "I'm actually more worried about Michigan State than Alabama" 5 minutes before Alabama bent MSU over. I say that quote to illustrate the lack of respect. They are so, so blinded by their hatred of the SEC (and any team that someone suggests is better than Clemson) that they can't rationally talk football involving other teams. They also boo the other team's injuries (including injuries when Clemson is on defense, like what???) It's just a weird culture that has developed.
Oh I see, that makes sense. Honestly I haven't paid any attention to Clemson fans or met any, so I couldn't say or imagine them being worse than WVU fans, who I have met and attended games with. The only other school that had more annoying fans was LOLUVA, and they actually may have been more obnoxious.
I've been to every away stadium in the ACC except FSU and BC, and NC State fans are the absolute worst. That 2005 game when Marcus Vick and that nasty defense busted a cap in the wolfpack was the worst display of sportsmanship and classiness by college sports fans I have ever seen.
It's funny how everyone has their stories. My wife hates Georgia fans because at the Peach Bowl some Georgia fans ransacked and stole some MV color guard girls' personal bags. Later, other guard girls got beer poured on them by Bama fans right before they went on the field in the Georgia Dome at halftime.
So she hates Georgia and Bama fans with a fiery passion. I hate Clemson fans, mostly due to what I saw at a VT baseball game circa 2006, along with what Chris described above about the younger fans.
And of course we both hate UVA.
And everybody has their personal stories of good and bad run ins with certain fanbases. I guess it doesn't do much good to paint with such a widebrush. But I will say that I haven't heard one ill word spoken about anyone from Nebraska.
It's funny because I actually had a decent experience with Georgia fans. My dad and I shared a shuttle back to the hotel with some after that CFA Bowl. My dad pointed out that both sets of fans needed the other for the game to be meaningful, and the Georgia fans said that we were much better to deal with than the couch burning cousins they had faced the year before.
Exactly...as described above, it's boring as hell.
And the worst part is it takes forever to start the game. While most ABC Saturday Night Football games kick off by 8:15, I'm pretty sure the last time I saw a Clemson home game in that slot kicked off closer to 8:30.
Sat in the OSU section last year when we hosted the Suckeyes and their fans would not stop talking about how they were dying to see our entrance. I thought that was cool as hell. What was weird, and still cool, was when the OSU fans around us started jumping and filming the entrance with their phones with us four Hokies sitting in the middle of them.
"sitting"?
Touche.
Here is another Clemson tradition. The tossing of the ceremonial hat
Some day I would like to see an even older VT tradition re-enacted: When we used to meet VMI in Roanoke for the Thanksgiving day football game, the band used to strike up the "Parade of the Charioteers" from the movie Ben Hur when the Corps entered a natural echo chamber of tall buildings on both sides of the street while marching from the train station to the stadium. A youtube link below gives you a small idea of what it sounded like, but remember at that time we had a presidential inauguration winning Highty Tighty Band of over 300 members and at least three rows of tubas adding base to the song along with the marching step of the Corps on the pavement to keep time. I remember seeing the mouths drop of the VMI cadets watching on the side of the street.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzig0qI7SFg
As an HT alum, I'd play Ben Hur instead of Bravura (for the trillionth time) any friggin' day!
Guys, I love sandman but nothing is nearly as "exciting" as hoping and praying somebody trips down the hill... /s
That prospect, to be honest, is oddly appealing to me. But I'm highly entertained by the "fail" phenomenon.
I think the Clemson fat guys have to spend an inordinate amount of time with choreographers practicing for the big stage.
"Cut! Take it from the top there twinkle-toes!"
wait...so they actually practice their entrance? LOL
Probably, I never asked any of the players I knew, but it would make sense because multiple players have been seriously injured on the hill (broken legs/torn knee ligaments.)
what an embarrassing way to injure yourself. That's actually really unfortunate. I hate to see kids get hurt but it's especially bad if they get hurt doing something unnecessary, like running down a hill before a game (or practicing running down a hill for a game). You would think, with all the emphasis on player safety, that the whole running-down-the-hill thing would be abolished. Especially if what you say is true about multiple players being seriously injured doing it. That's outrageous.
Nah, that's a football camp for donors/boosters, where you get the experience of being on the team for a day. VT does the same thing
Hey fuck you guy.
I have never understood why Clemson's entrance gets so much praise. As everyone has stated above, they literally prance down a hill after touching a little rock while hundreds of balloons... yes, balloons, get released... If it were hundreds of Doves, then we are talking.... Also, I think OSU's entrance is pretty awesome. I was recording their whole dotting the i entrance while in the shoe and really felt the atmosphere growing, very cool.
Dotting of the "i" is a good tradition. I like the MV's, but TBDBITL is really a spectacle. the 'shoe was a great atmosphere and the fans were actually quite cordial there despite sitting smack in the middle of the season ticket holder section (and dealing with an epic loss).
Its typically not the alumni you have to worry about. Its the "guvmnt check got cashed today and i bought me sum tickets" and the Walmart fans that make me dislike anOSU (and wvu)
But I agree, the Clemson entrance is 4th most exciting entrance in the ACC
VT, FSU, ????, Clemson, etc. etc.
Miami??? Nothing like pulling the pin on a fire extinguisher...
Yes, Miami. Ive only been to one game there and the stadium was nearly empty (maybe 20k and 1/4 were Hokies) but it was still a cool entrance. The smoke tunnel combined with a great sound system made a really memorable effect. If they ever get back to near capacity attendance, it would be very impressive.
Then again, I was three sheets so maybe that had something to do with it
I kind of like the GT Ramblin' Wreck (1930 Ford Model A Sport Coupe) leading the team onto the field with a bunch of cheerleaders hanging off of it. Sure beats riding a bus a few feet, rubbing a doorstop, and then jogging down a small decline.
I went there for grad school and went to a bunch of games, it was OK. Doesn't really compare to Lane. I'd rank entrances VT, FSU, Clemson, The Rest...
I don't know, that part where the CavMan falls off the horse is a winner in my book, maybe good enough for second behind Enter Sandman.
Not to mention the energizing, thrilling, edge-of-your-seat pandemonium that is the team bus ride halfway around the stadium before they run down the hill to a flurry of balloons. Absolute heart-racing energy right here. Nothing fires me up like filing onto a charter bus and driving 1/8th of a mile.
I had to watch this video to believe it but....I can't get into this.... If this is the most exciting 25 seconds in college football, then I'm sticking to the NFL....
It is the most exciting 25 seconds, because most other teams have more than 25 seconds of excitement.
A friend of mine told me they have a pill that will help with making that 25 seconds last a bit longer.
yeah, but then it lasted over four hours and I was told that's a problem
I remember when I had the most exciting 25 seconds ever for the first time. I was also slightly embarrassed...
Needless to say, I think it's safe to say my moment was more exciting than Clemson's entrance
"Even Georgia had to take a peak."
No Brent, I think they were all standing off to the side there laughing and asking themselves if they could prance down a hill like that.
I thought the Caviller falling off the horse as you ride onto the field was impressive. It kind of sets the tone for the whole game. LOLUVA
If you reverse our records the last 5 years, I have a feeling we would be first.
Clemson can go kick rocks
And speaking of rubbing the rock
My favorite pregame tradition is the one before our bowl game/acc championship game: beating LOLUVa.