Clemson Football: A Tribute to the Power Rangers

Disclaimer: I’m from Richmond, VA.  That means that any Clemson athlete from RVA is (to me) literally the greatest to ever do it.  Greatest Point Guard ever?  Vernon Hamilton.  Next question.  Most incredible inside linebacker?  Kavell Conner, and not just because he lit. me. up. as a freaking running back in high school.  K’Von Wallace will probably have 38 INTs this year, and that’s only because Clemson will have walk-ons in for at least half of every game.  So it should not come as a surprise that Clelin Ferrell is the champion (of my heart) defensive end of Clemson’s history of stud defensive ends.  And maybe the best of the Power Rangers.

Every year, we get excited about Clemson football’s incoming recruiting class.  Lately, that excitement has been justified, since Clemson tends to bring in blue chip after blue chip after blue chip.  But 2015’s class was particularly special.  It brought in a lot of key players from the past four years.  Seriously, take a look.  It’s wild.

Who’s that up at the top?  Blink and you’ll miss him Deon Cain, that’s who.  Bam!  There’s Mitch Hyatt and Ray-Ray McCloud.  Tanner Muse hits that list harder than an undersized running back.  And you can’t talk about 2015’s class without talking about future Mizzou hero Kelly Bryant.

It also brought in the core of the Power Rangers: Christian Wilkins, Clelin Ferrell, Austin Bryant, and Dexter Lawrence a year later.  The glory that was the Power Rangers is the embodiment of the self-feeding culture that makes Clemson a place where great players want to be.  So as we move toward a world where maybe the greatest defensive line — certainly the most likeable positional unit — in Clemson history finds itself torn asunder by the NFL draft, I want to take one last opportunity to appreciate what they did for Clemson football.  It’s about rings, and it’s about culture.

First thing: championships.  Clemson is, and has been, on an ACC championship tear.  But the 2016 season gave Clemson the big one.  The prize that had eluded our beloved Tigers since 1981.  I still remember Christian Wilkins doing the splits with confetti littering the field after Clemson-Alabama II.  I use this gif almost weekly:

The first championship was incredible.  I honestly didn’t think that I would see one, since Alabama had the NCAA in a chokehold.  And when Clemson’s d-line started the 2017 season by harassing Jarett Stidham, it drove home the point of how special these guys were.  Christian and Clelin and Austin and Dexter combined for 7 (!!!) sacks.  2017 was going to be a fun season to watch.  And it was until Alabama stomped Clemson in the CFP.

After that game, I figured we’d seen the last of the Power Rangers, and nobody would have blamed them — especially Ferrell and Wilkins — if they had bounced.  Wilkins, Ferrell, and Bryant had their rings.  But they didn’t.  They ran it back.  In doing so, they flexed Clemson’s culture, and the world knows what happened.

Culture is the cultivation of bacteria, tissue cells, etc. in an artificial medium… wait.  As former NFL executive Michael Lombardi put it, “Culture is everything.”  (If you don’t know, the guy has a resume that’s better than yours.)  The fact that these guys (except Dex) could have gone pro, but instead opted to run it back in 2018 speaks volumes.  Some analysts had Wilkins and Ferrell going in the first (that might still happen).  That’s hard to turn down.

But they did.

I don’t pretend to know why.  Maybe they knew something about last year’s draft that I don’t.  Maybe they knew that 2018’s squad was going to be super-duper elite.  I like to imagine, though, that they are part of building something bigger.

I don’t know which, if any of these guys, is the leader of the group.  Wilkins seems to be the most vocal of them all.  I also don’t think it really matters.  They seemed to like doing their thing together, and that thing is ruining a offense’s day.  I am going to miss watching them play together so much.

By all accounts, these guys really seem to like each other.  Wilkins seems like a really great guy, although I’m sure his “lemonade” drives his servers nuts.  I’ll ride-or-die for Ferrell because Richmond, but mostly because he seems likes a great dude as well.

All of that applies to Austin Bryant, who said:

"“That was a main thing for all of us that came back. We wanted to get this team back on the top of the mountain. If I could walk I was going to be out on the field. I wanted to do what was best for the team and not necessarily myself.”"

When you like the guys you play with and you’re working toward the same goal, you can make special things happen.  Think about a terrible job you’ve had.  How hard was it moving forward when you hated your boss?  Did you do more than the minimum?  Did you dip as soon as your shift was done?  (For me: yes, yes, and I left early if I could).

Getting them there is both a process from the outside: i.e. Dabo and Brent have built something great.  But at some point this sort of thing starts to feed itself.  It has to.  That’s culture.  That, to me, is the biggest hole Xavier Thomas, K.J. Henry and co. need to fill.

The Power Rangers are what Culture gets you.  The Power Rangers are what builds your Culture.