How a clothing store owner found the secret to beating Clemson QB Trevor Lawrence

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.

The coach who beat Lawrence

In late 2017, Lawrence was already committed to Clemson and was tearing up high school football in Georgia for the third straight year. His Cartersville Purple Hurricanes had already won Georgia state championships in both his sophomore and junior seasons (2015 and 2016). Lawrence entered the second-round home playoff game against Blessed Trinity with stats that were almost unheard of: 40 touchdown passes against only one interception.

Blessed Trinity also had a lot of talent, but few of the Titans’ top players were seniors and many played both ways.

“If we played Cartersville 10 times that year,” Blessed Trinity coach Tim McFarlin said, “we’d probably lose nine. We just weren’t quite there yet. We were young. But that night we played the best defensive game we ever had.”

And why was that?

“You need to talk to John Thompson,” McFarlin said.

John Thompson — and we’re not talking about the former Georgetown basketball coach — is one of those guys who just can’t get enough of coaching. He loves the game. He also was immensely over-qualified to be a high school defensive coordinator.

He was a former SEC defensive coordinator at Florida, South Carolina and (very briefly) at LSU. He was once the head football coach at East Carolina in 2003-04, getting fired after two seasons in which the Pirates went 3-20. He practically kept the moving industry in business, working at 18 different colleges over a 38-year coaching career.

By 2017, though, Thompson was in his early 60s and sort of figured he had had enough of coaching.

But Thompson had met McFarlin — a high school football lifer who has coached at the prep level for nearly 40 years — many years earlier. Thompson and his wife were running a clothing store in Alpharetta, Ga., by then. Anxious for some coaching talk, Thompson made the 15-minute drive to go see McFarlin in nearby Roswell .

“And a couple of days later, Coach McFarlin’s defensive coordinator quit,” Thompson said. “So he offered me the job.”

In college, Thompson was known for gambling, blitz-heavy packages. When it came time to face Lawrence and Cartersville, he figured that would be Blessed Trinity’s only chance — if he didn’t over-think it.

In pregame warmups, as a crowd of several thousand filed into Cartersville’s home stadium, Thompson studied Lawrence for a few minutes until he realized he might psych himself out if he kept doing so.

“I walked out there in pregame and saw Trevor throwing those missiles,” Thompson said. “And I just went back inside the locker room. I didn’t want to see any more of that. That was the best high school quarterback I’ve ever seen.”

But Thompson had some great chess pieces himself — two high-major Division I players in running back/linebacker Steele Chambers (now at Ohio State) and linebacker JD Bertrand (Notre Dame).

“We sent six or seven guys at Trevor on nearly every pass play,” Thompson said. “And we sent those two guys on blitzes most of the time. And I think Trevor got a little tired. He had never had to run like that.”

Anyone who saw Lawrence’s 67-yard rushing touchdown against Ohio State in the College Football Playoff semifinal Dec. 28 knows he can run. But on that night, Lawrence ran the ball 13 times for only 22 yards. He was sacked four times.

The final touchdown

With Cartersville receivers dropping several of the passes Lawrence did throw, Blessed Trinity took a 14-3 halftime lead on two touchdown runs by Chambers. The Blessed Trinity students who had made the 75-minute drive were going delirious in the stands, with one holding up a sign that ripped the star QB on the other sideline by proclaiming: “Trevor Lawrence listens to Nickelback.”

“We were down and they got those quick 14 points,” Lawrence said, “but then we came back.”

Lawrence threw his only touchdown pass of the game in the third quarter, cutting Blessed Trinity’s lead to 14-9 after Cartersville missed the two-point conversion. Then came a 75-yard punt return TD for Cartersville, and a successful two-pointer gave it a 17-14 lead – its first of the game.

Cartersville had a chance to put the game away twice in the fourth quarter. But Bertrand recovered a fumble caused by Jacob Koelsch inside the 10 for Blessed Trinity on one possession. On the next, Lawrence couldn’t lead his offense to make a clinching first down.

Still down three points, with Lawrence watching from the sideline, the Titans went on a drive to the Cartersville 27 as the clock ticked below a minute.

Blessed Trinity quarterback Jake Smith — who now plays at Air Force — lined his team up in a “heavy formation” that featured only one wide receiver.

“It was third down,” Lawrence said. “The clock was running. They had the ball.”

Said McFarlin, Blessed Trinity’s head coach: “It was third-and-9 and I’m assuming they thought we were positioning ourselves for a tying field goal. But we went play-action, and that got our best receiver one-on-one with their corner.”

Smith lofted the ball deep in the end zone to Ryan Davis, who grabbed it for a 27-yard touchdown.

“They were up by four with 12 seconds left,” Lawrence said. “We got to run one play. Our guy caught it, made a guy miss, didn’t get out of bounds and the clock ran out.”

Rooting for Trevor

Lawrence was gracious in defeat, just as he is now when he loses a game of ping-pong to Clemson receiver Will Swinney.

“The guy doesn’t lose much at anything, though,” Swinney said. “Even his intramural basketball team won the championship here.”

Lawrence lost that night in 2017, though, undone by the Blessed Trinity blitz. Blessed Trinity went on to win the state championship that season and in 2018 and 2019, too. McFarlin is still the team’s head coach. Thompson also coached in 2018, but has since returned to running his clothing store full-time.

“Even after all those years of college coaching, beating Trevor Lawrence in high school is one of the biggest highlights of my career,” Thompson said.

Lawrence, of course, won a national championship as a true freshman in 2018 at Clemson and has a chance at a second one Monday night. He said his last football loss taught him: “Don’t take things for granted. At that point, we had won 41 straight … You’ve got to prepare every week and earn it.”

As for McFarlin and Blessed Trinity?

“This says a lot for Trevor,” McFarlin said. “Everyone at Blessed Trinity is pulling for him, because of the kind of guy he is. Also, we kind of like the notoriety. We selfishly always want to be the only team that ever beat him. I hope he never loses again.”

This story was originally published January 9, 2020 at 2:33 PM with the headline "How a clothing store owner found the secret to beating Clemson QB Trevor Lawrence."