Clemson opens the season tonight at 11^th-ranked LSU, as the ACC’s Tigers visit Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, La. The game kicks off at 7:49 p.m., EST, on ABC.

Last year, the Bayou Bengals took down Clemson 17-10 at Clemson’s Death Valley. Tonight’s rematch will now be played in LSU’s version of Death Valley. But who is college football’s real Death Valley.

Who owned the nickname first? Who is college football’s real Death Valley according to history, not perception?

There really is no debate. It’s Clemson and here is why.

While Clemson and LSU fans — and even third-party observers — love to banter about which school is home to the “real Death Valley,” answers to questions about which school has the “original Death Valley” are a matter of public record.

ESPN’s Ryan McGee was among several to chronicle the etymology of the facilities in 2020 prior to the two program’s National Championship matchup in January of 2020. McGee writes:

“Thurman ‘Crowe’ Peele was born and made his name as an amateur boxer in the Carolinas, but he attended LSU, where he won the 1955 NCAA heavyweight title. He went on to post a 37-2 professional record, became the sparring partner for heavyweight legend Archie Moore and, in the 1960s, opened a gas station in Baton Rouge literally within shouting distance of Tiger Stadium. The crowds at LSU home games would shake the walls and rattle the glass of Peele’s service station, so he nicknamed the stadium ‘Deaf Valley.’ Soon fellow LSU fans adopted the moniker.

“For some, ‘Death’ actually predated ‘Deaf’ in Baton Rouge. On Jan. 1, 1959, when LSU and Heisman Trophy winner Billy Cannon capped the school’s first national title with a 7-0 victory in the Sugar Bowl, some of those fans stole ‘Death’ when describing the home valley. Why? Because they believed they had earned that right after defeating the team that was already using the name for its home stadium.

“Yep, Clemson.

“The first known ‘Death Valley’ reference tossed Memorial Stadium’s way came more than 10 years before Peele’s nickname. In 1945, Lonnie McMillan, head coach of the rival Presbyterian College Blue Hose, had just endured a 76-0 rout at the hands of the orange-and-white Tigers. At the time, tradition held that PC and Clemson always played the season opener. And those games, in September in South Carolina, are essentially like playing football inside a pottery kiln, especially on Clemson’s home field, which sits in a natural gorge, built atop bedrock and surrounded by reflective white concrete.

“According to the official Clemson history books, McMillan had visited the Mojave Desert a decade earlier en route the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. He compared the unpleasantness of that mid-summer desert experience to his September visits to play the Tigers, saying Clemson was ‘college football’s Death Valley.’ Frank Howard, the gregarious Alabama grad who had taken over as Clemson head coach five years earlier, loved the story and repeatedly recounted it. He told it so much, it eventually stuck.”

**LSU’s Tiger Stadium was not called “Death Valley” until 1958 at the earliest, some 13 years after Clemson’s Memorial Stadium, above, started using the moniker.** *(photos courtesy of Clemson and LSU Athletics)*

McGee’s account was corroborated by an LSU historian in a 2020 article by Grace Raynor for the Charleston Post & Courier. Raynor writes:

“According to Bud Johnson, the SID from 1966-71, LSU only started calling itself Death Valley after the SEC Tigers swiped it from the ACC Tigers following the two teams’ meeting in the 1958 Sugar Bowl.

“LSU referring to itself as ‘Deaf Valley’ before it became Death Valley originates from a gas station in the adjacent commercial area not far from LSU’s campus. Crowe Peel, a former LSU boxer and 1949 national champion, named his gas station ‘Deaf Valley’ because of the noise that boomed from Tiger Stadium.

“‘I’m an LSU fan but I side with Clemson,’ Johnson said.

Below are a few notes on tonight’s game in Baton Rouge.

Tonight’s game further extends Clemson’s recent track record of opening seasons against marquee opponents. Clemson and Florida State were the only programs in the nation to open against an AP Top 10 opponent in three of the last five seasons.
With this week’s game against No. 11 LSU, Clemson will become the only program in the nation to have faced four AP Top 11 opponents in season openers since 2021.
Though the game will be the sixth all-time meeting between Clemson and LSU and the third game in the series in the state of Louisiana, Saturday’s contest will mark Clemson’s first visit to Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge. Clemson will attempt to become the first team to earn victory in its first visit to Baton Rouge since UAB upset Nick Saban’s Tigers, 13-10, on Sept. 23, 2000.
With a victory, Clemson would join UAB and 13 other programs to win their first all-time game at Tiger Stadium since the facility opened in 1924, including Tulane (1924), Alabama (1925), Tennessee (1926), Oregon (1932), Georgia Tech (1944), Kentucky (1949), Maryland (1951), Baylor (1960), Colorado (1971), USC (1979), Florida State (1979), Miami (Ohio) (1986) and Arkansas (1993).
The 2026 season opener will represent the sixth all time meeting between Clemson and LSU but the first in Baton Rouge. LSU presently leads the series, 4-1. LSU was the nation’s No. 1-ranked team in two of the teams’ previous five meetings, both of which resulted in LSU victories amid national championship seasons.

—courtesy of Clemson Athletics