No. 1 Clemson goes down
No. 1 Clemson rallied from a 13-point deficit on the road without star quarterback Trevor Lawrence, but it wasn’t enough as No. 4 Notre Dame won an overtime thriller 47-40 on Saturday in South Bend, Indiana.
D.J. Uiagalelei, the replacement for Lawrence, threw for a career-high 439 yards and totaled three touchdowns, but the Fighting Irish ended the Tigers’ 36-game regular-season winning streak. It’s the first ACC defeat since falling to Syracuse in 2017.
The Irish scored on a 3-yard TD run in the second overtime to put ND up for good, and after two sacks on Uiagalelei in the final drive, and his fourth-down pass came up short to seal it for the Irish.
Notre Dame (7-0) led 23-10 in the second quarter and nearly squandered the game away in regulation, but quarterback Ian Book used a 53-yard pass play to Avery Davis on ND’s final drive of the fourth quarter to set up a 4-yard TD pass to Davis to tie the game at 33-all with 22 seconds remaining.
Clemson (7-1) had fumbles on back-to-back drives in the first half that helped the Irish build that lead, but the Tigers fought back with a pair of B.T. Potter field goals and a TD pass from Uiagalelei to Davis Allen in the third quarter.
With three Clemson defensive starters declared out before the game and two more going down during the game with an injury, Notre Dame racked up over 500 total yards while the Tigers had 473 yards.
Up next: Clemson gets its second week off of the season and will head to Florida State on Nov. 21. The Seminoles, who are also off next week, lost 41-17 to Pitt and fell to 2-5 overall.
