CLEMSON, S.C. _ Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence famously doesn't lose.
He's 29-0 in college. At one point, he won 41 straight games in high school. In four of the past five football seasons Lawrence has played, his teams have gone undefeated.
But there is one shocking exception to all that excellence. It happened Nov. 17, 2017.
On that wild Friday night in Georgia, Lawrence was a senior in high school at Cartersville, Ga., and the top quarterback prospect in the country. But he was bewildered by a defensive scheme drawn up by a high school assistant coach who was earning a coaching stipend of $6,000 a year and making ends meet by running a clothing store with his wife.
Monday night, LSU defensive coordinator Dave Aranda will try to flummox Lawrence in the national championship game in New Orleans. Aranda is college football's highest-paid assistant at $2.5 million a year. That's nearly 417 times more than the salary of that high school assistant (who also happened to be a serious coaching ringer, but we'll get to that).
It's hard to imagine, though, that Aranda will do a better job than the coaches and players of Blessed Trinity did 788 days before, when they beat the unbeatable QB.
"It sucked," said Lawrence, who threw for only 142 yards that night in his final high school game and can still describe that 21-17 loss to Blessed Trinity in minute detail. "When I came to (Clemson), I was like, 'I don't want to lose anymore.' Me and Coach (Dabo) Swinney have had talks like: 'It's not in the rulebook that you have to lose.' "
And Lawrence hasn't _ not at Clemson. But he has lost, and this is the story of the last time it happened.
