Saturday night’s showdown between Clemson and LSU will be the first regular season meeting between the two storied college football programs, which have been competing for decades on a more rhetorical playing field.
The evidence is front and center in both teams’ online stores. LSU’s sells a $33 purple t-shirt with an LSU helmet and the words “The Real Death Valley.” Clemson’s sells a $33 orange version with the exact same slogan.
The two football teams—both with Tiger mascots and both currently ranked in the AP Top 10—each claim the nickname as the preferred moniker for their home venues. A big sign in the middle of Clemson’s Memorial Stadium reads “Clemson Welcomes You to Death Valley.” A sign in LSU’s Tiger Stadium, in basically the same place, reads “Welcome to Death Valley.”
It’s the kind of dispute, particularly with its commercial uses, that might typically result in a trademark battle of some sort. Death Valley, however, is already the name of a national park in California, and in trademark law, location names don’t need protection when they’re being used to designate a physical place.
A quick search of the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office database reveals just four active Death Valley trademarks: one for an Irish alcohol brand, one for a South Korean video game publisher, one for dry shampoo, and another registered to a cigar company based, likely not coincidentally, in Louisiana.
Both schools use the name freely, and neither seems bothered by the other. If anything, the lack of trademarks makes the nickname easy fodder for unlicensed apparel makers, who do seem to use it liberally.
America’s original Death Valley, of course, is in the northern Mojave Desert in California. That nickname was coined back in the 1840s, during the California gold rush, due to its arid climate and high temperatures. It is the location of the hottest air temperature ever recorded in the U.S.—134 degrees Fahrenheit, in 1913—a perfect metaphor for the hostile environments that sports fans try to create for visiting teams.
In college football, Clemson’s claim to the name appears to be significantly older that LSU’s. According to the university, the nickname was coined in the 1940s by Lonnie McMillian, the head coach of nearby rival Presbyterian College in Clinton, S.C. Clemson and Presbyterian played every year back then, and after a 76-0 loss at Clemson in 1945, McMillian called the stadium “college football’s Death Valley.” Clemson fans gradually claimed the name for themselves.
Before every home game, Clemson’s football team runs into Memorial Stadium by running past—and rubbing for good luck—a small boulder known as Howard’s Rock. It was brought to South Carolina by a Clemson alum named S.C. Jones, who picked it up in the 1960s while driving through the California desert. It’s affixed atop to a plaque that reads, “From Death Valley, CA to Death Valley, SC.”
LSU’s use of Death Valley is significantly less documented. Tiger Stadium has long been considered one of the loudest stadiums in college football—in 1988 following a critical touchdown, fans caused an earth tremor that registered on a seismograph at the school’s geology department—and it was known locally as ‘Deaf Valley’ as early as the 1950s, according to local historians. That didn’t fully shift to ‘Death Valley’ until the early 1980s, according Baton Rouge Advocate columnist Jack Barlow, who attributed it to athletic director Bob Brodhead.
In a 1987 speech in front of Congress, Louisiana representative Richard Baker called the stadium “the real Death Valley.” It’s unclear if he was assigning secondary status to the California desert or Clemson’s venue, or both.
Another LSU theory is that the term firmly took root a little later, in the 1990s, thanks to its use by local sports reporters. Others say it was a natural progression over the years because “deaf” and “death” sound the same in Cajun accents. Regardless, it was well codified by 2011, when Dan Borné, the Tigers’ PA announcer since 1986, wrote a poem called “Saturday Night in Death Valley” that has become a tradition at the stadium.
Through the years, there have been playful jabs from both sides about Death Valley’s rightful claimant. In 2017, running back recruit Travis Etienne, a Louisiana native, committed to Clemson by saying he was going to “the real Death Valley.” Current LSU head coach Brian Kelly, in the run-up to Saturday’s game, has called Clemson’s venue both “Death Valley Jr.” and “not Death Valley.”
LSU had an athletic budget of $219.3 million in fiscal 2024, according to Sportico’s college finance database, which ranked seventh among all public schools. Clemson’s budget was $181.9 million, which ranked 18th. The two schools have played four times in their history, all at neutral sites, including the national championship game in 2020. Saturday night’s game at Memorial Stadium is the first of a home-and-home series, and the first time the two have squared off in either school’s home venue.