Two months into the college football season, long-time ESPN journalist Bill Connelly has released his updated Power Four QB rankings, where Clemson Tigers quarterback Cade Klubnik climbed 26 spots to No. 28 nationally. And this time, Connelly had a far more optimistic assessment of the veteran quarterback.
“It happened too late to save Clemson’s season in any major way (occasional rubbish from the defense didn’t help either),” Connelly stated. “But in October, Cade Klubnik officially became Cade Klubnik again.”
To understand how far he climbed, you have to go back to how the year began.
Heading into the 2025 season, Clemson and head coach Dabo Swinney felt confident with Klubnik leading a team with national championship ambitions. But it took only five weeks for the former five-star recruit to slide from Heisman contender to a struggling starter.
In the first edition of ESPN’s 2025 Power Four quarterback rankings, Klubnik ranked as the 14th-worst QB nationally and 11th-worst in the ACC (No. 54 overall). The ranking came with a detailed critique by Connelly that helped explain the drop.
“It’s just shocking how poor Clemson’s passing game has been this year,” Connelly said. “Klubnik ranks 93rd in yards per dropback, 102nd in success rate and 96th in interception rate. He’s facing blitzes constantly behind a banged-up offensive line (the run game has been wholly mediocre), and he’s firing short and mostly ineffective passes. He posted a 78.7 Total QBR in 2024, but he hasn’t topped 60.0 in a 2025 game yet. This has been an utterly disastrous September.”
Fast-forwarding back to now, Connelly highlighted the vast difference between Klubnik’s first four games and his four most recent games to support his rankings.
In Klubnik’s first four games of 2025, where he led the Tigers to a 1-3 record, the dual-threat signal caller accounted for 1,056 all-purpose yards, seven touchdowns and four interceptions. He also held a 44.9 Total QBR, 60.1% completion rate, 11.2 yards per completion and 2.7% INT rate through those contests.
Since then, Klubnik has totaled 1,197 yards with 10 touchdowns to just one interception. Over that four-game stretch, he’s posted an 89.6 Total QBR, completed 77.8% of his passes, averaged 12.5 yards per completion, and thrown picks on just 0.9% of his attempts. With him playing at that level, Clemson has gone 3-1 and climbed back to the brink of bowl eligibility.
But even with his progress, Connelly put Clemson and Klubnik’s season in perspective with one final thought, noting, “This will always go down as a massively disappointing season, but Klubnik did show up, at least.”
