Clemson stormed the court following win over Kentucky: 'It's everyone's Super Bowl.'

Clemson students waited outside in the cold for hours to watch the Kentucky Wildcats play inside Littlejohn Coliseum for the first time ever.

The last time these two teams met was all the way back in 1997. After an Elite Eight run in 2023-24, Clemson came into Tuesday night rolling once again with a 7-1 record while receiving votes in the latest AP Poll. Meanwhile, Kentucky entered with a perfect 7-0 record and a fresh No. 4 ranking in the country. ESPN was on the scene to broadcast the late-night showdown. The student section was packed well before the game started. By tipoff, all 9,000 seats were filled with orange and white.

What’s the old saying again? That Kentucky is everybody’s Super Bowl? It was treated as such by Clemson and its fans in one of the biggest regular season wins the program has ever pulled off. The Tigers won a 70-66 rock fight that took nearly 2.5 hours to complete despite the 9:30 p.m. local time start. When the final buzzer sounded, fans immediately flooded the court as the party was underway.

“Well it’s Kentucky, you know? It’s everyone’s Super Bowl,” Kentucky head coach Mark Pope said postgame. “This is our guys’ first experience here and it won’t ever get easier. This is why you come here, this is why you put on this jersey, so you can do that, you can be everybody’s Super Bowl. That’s an honor but it also requires us to be great and tonight we weren’t quite great enough.”

Clemson storms the court as a 1.5-point underdog against Kentucky pic.twitter.com/5YFFnTD7Y8

— Jack Pilgrim (@JackPilgrimKSR) December 4, 2024

Some members of the Big Blue Nation won’t like hearing that Super Bowl line from Pope, which was made famous by former head coach John Calipari over the course of his tenure at UK. But Clemson sure treated this as a Super Bowl-like event. Kentucky, not so much… The Tigers were the far more physical team from start to finish and it showed in the win column.

Like it or not, Kentucky is going to play in several more “Super Bowl” games this season on the road. Opposing teams will be rough and their fans loud. To a slightly lesser extent, there’s another Super Bowl coming up on Saturday in Seattle against No. 7 Gonzaga. Although it’s not technically a true road game for the Wildcats, you can expect Gonzaga fans to fill most if not all 18,300 seats at Climate Pledge Arena.

Now that this group of Wildcats has finally experienced life on the road, it’ll hopefully calm the nervous energy that we saw against Clemson. They’ll have a few more days to figure it out.