Great wins and demoralizing losses

Clemson Tigers Insiders has been running a series on Clemson's greatest victories and worst defeats. Check it out.

Winston-Salem catches up on the Bowden story

Bill Cole of the Winston-Salem Journal has a column about Clemson coach Tommy Bowden's fantastic finish to the 2003 season and his prospects for a long career at Clemson.

WELCOME TO THE HALL: The Greenville News' Bart Wright takes us back to the old days of Clemson with a profile of Dreher "Goon" Gaskin, who played football at Clemson from 1949-53 and was recently inducted into the South Carolina Athletic Hall of Fame.

SECOND-BEST? SouthernPigskin.com has an article that ranks the Clemson-South Carolina rivalry as the second-best in the South, trailing only Alabama-Auburn.

I know the Tigers-Gamecocks rivalry is intense, but it's pretty one-sided. I dunno; I think I might rank Georgia-Florida ahead of our annual tilt with USC.

Jefferson-Pilot, ACC ink new TV deal

The league and the regionally syndicated network extended their agreement through 2010. (More here.) Financial terms were not released.

I guess this means the noon kickoffs aren't going anywhere.

Bart Wright: 'Bring Back Danny' -- to the Ring of Honor

The Greenville News' sports columnist way overstates the "controversy" involving the coach who led Clemson to the 1981 national championship, but otherwise he makes a good point about the university honoring Coach Ford.

Tigerden has moved to a new home

Tigerden, a fine Clemson blog put together by Jim Brown, has a new address. Check it out.

Hall of Fame inductees for 2004 named

The list includes a couple of football players: Randy Scott and Stacy Long.

Clemson and the ACC 'arms race'

Here's an interesting column on the importance of facilities to success in athletics. Give it a look.

DEPTH CHART RELEASED: The State takes a look at Clemson's preseason depth chart. And here's the chart from the official Clemson site.

BOOKS I'VE READ: OK, with the demise of the Friday Five, I've been looking for non-sports-related stuff to post on Fridays during the off-season. Here's one of those things. You copy and paste this list of 100 "great books," and boldface the ones you've read. Here goes:

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice (Part of it)
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Bront�, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Bront�, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel Garc�a - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

Not bad, I guess. There are a lot of books on this list that I want to read, and there are others here that I actually own but haven't gotten around to reading. Maybe this summer.

ACC TV deal: What does it mean for Clemson?

More money, obviously, but equally important, greater exposure, says athletic director Terry Don Phillips.

(UPDATED at 4:13 p.m.)

ACC announces rich new TV deal

The league's new TV contract with ESPN and ABC is reportedly worth about $258 million. I'm very busy today, but read about it here.

WE'RE NO. 13: Athlon magazine is releasing its football top 25 for 2004 in increments, and today Clemson checks in at No. 13. Check it out.

Nine cities vie for ACC title game

Via Fanblogs, I see that Charlotte, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and Tampa are all in the mix as potential hosts of an ACC football championship game.

My vote is for Charlotte, because that's where I grew up. But D.C. would be OK, too, because that's where I live.

IPTAY increases: More bang for more bucks?

Columnist John Brasier of the Anderson Independent-Mail says recent increases in contribution levels for IPTAY members are long overdue.

BRING BACK DANNY? The Greenville News' Bart Wright says reports that Danny Ford will be taking some role in Clemson's athletics program are premature.

Yanity named permanent 'voice of the Tigers'

WSPA-TV sports anchor Pete Yanity will be Clemson's radio man for football and men's basketball. I think it's a good call, and you can read all about it here, here and here.

IPTAY DONATION LEVELS GO UP: Clemson's fundraising organization for athletics is increasing contribution levels by 40 percent across the board. It's the first increase since 1989.

THE FRIDAY FIVE: Is officially kaput.

Dantzler moves to receiver

Former Clemson quarterback Woodrow Dantzler has been moved to receiver by the Atlanta Falcons. Well, that should be interesting. Read all about it here, and get the password to read all about it here.

SWINNEY SPEAKS: Tigernet has an interview with assistant coach Dabo Swinney. Check it out.

Tiger tailgating -- a photo essay

I found this link on Tigernet's message board. Looks like a typical fun fall Saturday in Clemson.

Whitehurst named S.C. Amateur Athlete of the Year

Clemson quarterback Charlie Whitehurst, who had a monster sophomore season, will be honored at the S.C. Sports Hall of Fame banquet on May 20.

THIS & THAT: Tigernet's Dan Scott cleans out his notebook.

MIAMI LOOKS TOUGH: ESPN commentator Tony Barnhart takes an early look at the expanded ACC's football race.

(UPDATED at 7:31 p.m.)

Bring back Danny -- in 'unspecified roles'!

The State has a nice story about efforts to get former Clemson coach Danny Ford involved in the athletic department again. Sounds like a good idea to me.

DONNELL DOUBLED HIS EFFORTS: Criticism of Donnell Washington forced him to work extra-hard in preparation for the NFL draft.

WILL YANITY GET THE JOB? Here's one I noticed late Sunday evening. It appears that Pete Yanity will become the next radio voice of the Tigers, but his longstanding gig with WSPA-TV in Spartanburg could be a deal breaker. Stay tuned, as they say in TV land.