It’s bull crap.

That’s how Dabo Swinney described "Clemsoning," the derogative term that hovers over the program like a black cloud, goading the Tigers with promises of an inexplicable loss that will somehow undermine an otherwise promising season. Swinney rattles off the statistics -- now 39 straight wins against unranked opponents; bowl wins against elite programs such as LSU, Ohio State and Oklahoma; five straight 10-win seasons; now a berth in the College Football Playoff -- to combat the label, but that’s not how this game works.

It’s sort of like the old Johnny Cash song, "A Boy Named Sue." Clemson didn’t choose the moniker. It was bestowed upon the Tigers by diabolical forces, and their only option is to fight or be swallowed up by perception.

Well, I grew up quick and I grew up mean

My fist got hard and my wits got keen

I'd roam from town to town to hide my shame

That’s how Cash, another southern gentleman like Swinney, wrote the script. The gals would giggle, some guy would laugh. The Gamecocks would mock, and the Seminoles would tease. Oh, life ain’t easy for a team named Clemson.

It started as a joke. Dan Rubenstein and Ty Hildenbrandt host a popular college football podcast, "The Solid Verbal," an off-beat, inside-joke-driven show, and they really never expected the meme to catch on when they coined the term years ago. It’s just that those Tigers teams had a penchant for building up expectations with a few big wins here and there, then imploding against a lesser foe to crush the hopes of their fan base.

The term was salt in the wound, to be sure, but Rubenstein insists there was never any ill will.

"I actually really enjoyed the game I went to years ago at Death Valley," Rubenstein said. "It was just a jokey wording that took on a life of its own. It’s come to be taken pejoratively, but it was always meant to be another entry in our dictionary of fun."

The fans at Florida State and South Carolina certainly have enjoyed it. So, too, have plenty of media hoping to catch the attention of Millennials by using the trendy Internet lingo in old-guard stories.

After the Tigers inexplicably blew a sure win against FSU last season, fumbling in the red zone late in the fourth quarter, the Washington Post brought the term to its logical apex with this headline: "Against Florida State, Clemson’s Clemsoning was the most Clemsoning Clemson ever Clemsoned."

This is what happens when the grown-ups start trying to sound cool. They mangle the whole thing. That was a big game against the reigning ACC champion -- on the road, no less. That can’t be Clemsoning!

"At some point, it stopped being used correctly, and it became less fun," Rubenstein said.

So this season, the guys retired the term from use on their own show. Done. Finished. Not so much due to Clemson’s winning, but society’s corruption of the terminology.

Only, an official retirement doesn’t really end things any more than big wins or a Swinney tirade can. It’s part of the zeitgeist.

So how do you end a meme once it has reached the masses? Remember the "Boom Goes the Dynamite!" guy? Brian Collins was just filling in at the last minute on that brutal sportscast, and he has long since graduated from Ball State, become a successful professional, laughed off the jokes and enjoyed his life. He was one of the Internet’s earliest stars, a fore-runner for myriad cat videos and life fails.

But if Collins cured cancer tomorrow, people would simply say, hey, did you hear the "Boom Goes the Dynamite" guy cured cancer?

And that’s Clemson. The term has long since lost all relevance when it comes to the Tigers’ actual performance. Sure, there were Clemson teams in those early years of Swinney’s tenure that lost some bad games. Since then, Georgia and USC and UCLA and, yes even this week’s opponent in the College Football Playoff Semifinal at the Capital One Orange Bowl -- Oklahoma -- have lost far more of them than the Tigers ever did.

But if the Sooners beat the Tigers -- Oklahoma is favored, by the way -- someone, somewhere will call it Clemsoning because on the Internet, nothing disappears. Every meme is like a horror movie villain. It’s not dead. It’s just waiting to be revived.

That’s what’s so frustrating to Swinney. This season, his outbursts when the subject was broached were utterly reasonable. Good teams lose sometimes, and it has often nothing to do with preparation or talent, but simply the whims of fate, the bounces of an oblong ball. Swinney has done everything he can to limit those bad bounces, and from Brent Venables' stout defense to quarterback Deshaun Watson's explosive offense, the Tigers are as equipped as anyone to run the table. They could potentially be college football’s first-ever 15-0 team.

Oh, but that rotten name. It still holds power.

Think Oklahoma fans will do some taunting by throwing that ugly word around this week? Heck, more than a few Clemson fans still probably have a sinking feeling in the pit of their stomachs -- the way they did as South Carolina closed the gap in the regular-season finale or North Carolina collected an onside kick in the ACC championship game. Is this the week it happens again?

That’s really what Swinney’s emotion is all about. He didn’t change any hearts and minds among those with FSU flags flying or Gamecocks jerseys in their closets. He didn’t even keep the media from asking about Clemsoning again.

The message was for his fans and for the kids in the locker room.

This world is rough

and if a man's gonna make it, he's gotta be tough

And I knew I wouldn't be there to help ya along

So I give ya that name and I said goodbye

I knew you'd have to get tough or die

And it's the name that helped to make you strong

Through adversity, they thrive. Steel sharpens steel. Doing ordinary things in an extraordinary way. These aren’t from Swinney outbursts. They are the things he preaches every day. They could be summed up simply as anti-Clemsoning. It's what Johnny Cash was singing about.

In college football, the world is rough, and a team has to get tough to survive. That is what the team has done, what Swinney has done. It’s the result of being held to a standard that no other team in America is held to. It has become the straw man Swinney could point to and tell his team, "You see? They’re all against us." It didn’t create the talent on the roster, and it didn’t call the plays, but it sharpened the focus from one week to the next, as Clemson skipped through its slate to reach this point: 13-0, No. 1 in the nation, a date with Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl in the offing.

Will a national championship finally kill Clemsoning for good?

Perhaps the point is that it doesn’t matter. It has served its purpose, and it can live on alongside "Boom goes the dynamite" and crying Michael Jordan and all the other great memes of our time.

The point is that Clemson has moved on, and no matter how hilarious the next South Carolina fan or headline writer thinks they are when they mention the dreaded "C" word, there’s no comeback quite as powerful as holding up a championship ring without saying a word.

Two more wins, and life can be awfully fun for a team named Clemson.