Clemson Tigers Confirm Date of Opening Weekend Game with LSU Tigers
The ACC has decided to turn its 2025 football schedule into a three-day extravaganza, with the first drop on Thursday when the league released the zero week and week one games for each team.
To no real surprise, the Clemson Tigers will host the LSU Tigers on Aug. 30 in a battle of the two schools that call their stadiums “Death Valley.”
With more and more teams taking advantage of the ability to play a game in zero week — which is the weekend before the traditional start of the season on Labor Day weekend — the ACC took the chance to promote all of its games for its 17 teams.
But, the only ACC team taking advantage of zero week is Stanford, which will head to Hawai’i on Aug. 23.
The ACC will have games during the traditional opening weekend of the season that stretch from Thursday to Monday, with North Carolina getting a prime-time slot on Labor Day against TCU. It will be new coach Bill Belichick’s first game in Chapel Hill.
On Friday, all of the opening ACC games will be announced, including Clemson’s. Next week, the ACC will release the entire conference schedule.
The Tigers already know who their opponents will be next season, as that was determined last year.
Clemson is going to host Duke, Florida State, SMU and Syracuse and travel to Boston College, Georgia Tech, Louisville and North Carolina.
In non-conference, Clemson will also play Troy, Furman and South Carolina.
Troy will visit Clemson on Sept. 6. Furman visits Clemson on Nov. 22 and the Tigers head to South Carolina on Nov. 29 to finish the regular season.
The Tigers are coming off a 10-4 season, one in which Clemson got back into the ACC championship game, where they beat SMU on last-second field goal. That win cleared the Tigers’ path back to the College Football Playoff, which expanded to 12 teams for the first time.
It also marked Clemson’s first CFP appearance since 2020.
The Tigers are expected to return several of their top offensive players from a season ago, led by Cade Klubnik, who had the best season of his collegiate career and fashioned himself into a Heisman Trophy candidate for the 2025 season.
