The Story Behind Howard’s Rock And One Of College Football’s Most Thrilling Entrances

Elizabeth Hutchison HicklinWed, October 21, 2026 at 7:10 PM UTC

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Credit: Katie Januck/Getty Images

Outside of legendary performers—bold names like Lady Gaga and Beyoncé—no one has mastered the art of “making an entrance” quite like the collective college football universe. That’s especially true in the Southeast, where there’s no shortage of uniquely thrilling opening acts from Chief Osceola and his flaming spear at Florida State to the eagle’s pre-game lap around Jordan Hare Stadium at Auburn. But you can’t talk about college football entrances without mentioning Clemson’s electrifying combination of Howard’s Rock and “The Hill.”

Ten minutes before kickoff, the music cranks up in Memorial Stadium and pulses through the crowd. The Tiger Band waits on the field in “Death Valley” to welcome the team, while the latest hype video whips the orange-clad Clemson faithful into a frenzy—a scene coach Frank Howard could hardly have imagined back in the 1960s, when he first had the chunk of desert rock set atop the hill and told players, “If you can’t give me 110%, keep your filthy hands off my rock.”

Amid the fervor, anticipation builds and vibrates through the crowd. Players, coaches, and staff board buses outside the west end zone locker rooms, traveling around the stadium to the top of the steep, grassy slope at the back of the opposite end zone. There, the team swarms “Howard’s Rock” in a crush that would set a claustrophobe’s heart racing. Finally, with the boom of a cannon and the roar of the crowd, each team member and coach rubs Howard’s Rock for luck before hurtling down the hill toward the home sideline.

As a lifelong Clemson fan and a graduate of the university, I’ve participated in this pre-game pomp and pageantry since I was a child, and for me, almost forty years on, the spectacle still elicits goosebumps. But Clemson fans aren’t the only ones for whom the tradition holds sway. In 1985, Brent Musburger at CBS called the entrance “the most exciting 25 seconds in college football.” Two decades later, ESPN’s Chris Fowler went a step further when he dubbed it: “Perhaps the grandest entrance in sports.”

Humble Beginnings

The heart-pounding tradition didn’t start out that way but began for more practical purposes. “[The team] ran down the hill when the stadium opened in 1942 because there was no locker room in the stadium. The locker room was located up the road in Fike Fieldhouse, and walking down from Fike and entering the stadium via the hill was simply the easiest and most efficient way to enter,” says Timothy Bourret, the former Clemson Sports Information Director, who was nicknamed “Clemson Google” by his colleagues for his encyclopedic knowledge of all things orange-and-purple.

With similarly humble origins, Frank Howard’s famous rock, which was brought back to him by a fan from California’s Death Valley, began as a doorstop. “Coach had the rock about a year before putting it in the stadium,” Bourret says. “He didn’t know what to do with it. He finally told Gene Willimon, the director of IPTAY [Clemson’s booster club], to ‘Do something with it.’” Willimon had the rock formally installed on a pedestal atop the Hill ahead of the 1966 Virginia game. Still, it was only after the Tigers pulled off a miraculous comeback, recovering from five fumbles and an 18-point deficit to beat the Cavaliers that day, that the rock began to take hold of the imaginations of players and fans.

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“It was quite the debut for the rock,” Bourret says. “The next year, before the Wake Forest game, that Coach got the idea in his pre-game talk to tell his players to rub the rock because it would give them mystical powers to play well, saying… ‘If you can’t give me 110%, keep your filthy hands off my rock.’” Clemson went on to win the ACC championship in ’67, and Howard’s line and the rubbing of the rock became legend.

The Building Blocks of Tradition

In the years since, Tiger players and staff have rubbed the rock nearly 450 times, but the tradition nearly died in infancy when the school added locker rooms near the stadium’s west end zone before the 1971 season. As a result, the team abandoned the practice for the next two and a half seasons. Somewhat unfairly, Coach Hootie Ingram takes the blame for ending the tradition, but the school had spent a considerable amount of booster dollars to build new locker rooms in the west end zone, opposite the Hill, and it was simpler to enter directly onto the field.

A few games into the 1972 season, though, a handful of players, including Ben Anderson and Mike O’Cain, the future NC State head coach, approached Ingram about reinstituting the tradition before the South Carolina game. “They thought it would get the crowd fired up,” Bourret says. “It was Anderson who had the idea to rent school buses to carry the team to the other end of the stadium and the Hill.” Ingram agreed to the scheme, and Clemson went on to beat their in-state rivals 7-6 in cold, driving rain.

Four decades later, despite a handful of mostly minor injuries (the Hill’s angle of incline is more than thirty degrees), a few instances of vandalism, and our fair share of brutal losses (some years more than others), the tradition endures.

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Source: “AOL Sports”