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ACC Football Commissioner Michael Strickland said in an email in May 2024 that ESPN was offering several scheduling concessions to Clemson if the school agreed to play USC on Black Friday. He also said that USC would have agreed to play on Friday in the future. Clemson refused. While the final call was athletic director Graham Neff’s, Tigers coach Dabo Swinney has long been a critic of Friday night games, which the ACC began playing over a decade ago. The league has 12 Friday games this season. "I'm happy to go do it in Columbia if that's what they want to do," Swinney said last year. "But I was against it because I don't think it's what's best for Clemson. I think (it’s hard for) our students, for them, coming back here because they're off (from school for Thanksgiving)." Swinney voiced the same objection when the ACC began playing on Fridays, citing the desire to watch his sons play high school ball that night. Other parents, he said, had the same concerns. Counterpart Shane Beamer revealed that playing on a Friday had surfaced before. "Those are conversations that (former AD Ray Tanner) and I had two years ago, before the 2023 season. There was talk about potentially doing that," USC's coach said, also mentioning that he and Donati haven't talked about 2027. "I’d always want to do what’s best for the fans. I think it’s great from an exposure standpoint because it would be the only game on. There’s a lot of positives from that standpoint." Beamer, like Swinney, also mentioned that he'd certainly want to respect the high-school schedule, which would be deep into the playoffs on that Friday. Thanksgiving weekend is college football rivalry weekend, and several notable games are scheduled for this year’s Black Friday. The Egg Bowl (Ole Miss and Mississippi State), Texas-Texas A&M, Indiana-Purdue and Georgia-Georgia Tech are all set to meet. The USC-Clemson game, which was played for 111 consecutive years until 2020, is so important that it has waded into government on occasion, although it is untrue that the teams are legally required to play each other every year. In 2000, a bill was introduced in South Carolina to require USC and Clemson to play each other on Thanksgiving Day. It never made it out of committee.
