Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney lashed out at ACC officials on Saturday after a defensive pass interference call set up Duke’s game-winning score.
Duke, who was trailing the Tigers 45-38, had driven the ball to the Clemson 18-yard line and was looking for the go-ahead score. With 49 seconds left, Duke quarterback Darian Mensah was struggling to elude an intense pass rush from the Clemson defense and fired a pass to Duke wide receiver Que’Sean Brown.
The pass was incomplete. However, a flag was thrown on Clemson cornerback Aveion Terrell for pass interference.
Swinney and Clemson fans were incensed by the call, believing that Brown had shoved Terrell to the ground, and that, if anything, it should have been called offensive pass interference.
However, if looking at the play from the referee’s angle, you can see Terrell holding Brown through much of the play and then hurling himself backward when it didn’t look like Brown pushed him at all.
Of course, that was no consolation to Clemson fans, especially after Duke scored a touchdown on the very next play and a two-point conversion immediately afterward.
“I don’t know what to say about the last call,” Swinney told reporters after the game. “It shouldn’t come down to that. That’s one of the worst calls I’ve ever seen in a game ever, in my entire coaching career. I don’t want to make that a deal because it was one thing. You have a call like that? Man. That’s just more salt in the wound. But that’s not why we lost. We had plenty of opportunities to win.”
The Tigers, who began the season in the AP top 5, are not a five-loss team and are staring down the very real possibility of not going to a bowl game at all.
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