LOOK: LSU equipment truck breaks gate, fire erupts on videoboard as mishaps add salt to Clemson’s Week 1 wound

No. 4 Clemson dropped its marquee season-opener to No. 9 LSU in a 17-10 defeat that was tight from start to finish, and as if the narrow loss in a showdown with early College Football Playoff implications was not disappointing enough, a couple of mishaps at Memorial Stadium put salt in the wound. Not only did LSU hand Dabo Swinney’s program an early setback on the field, but its equipment truck dealt some accidental damage to the facility on its way out. A small fire erupted on the Memorial Stadium video board during the game, too.

As it exited from a loading dock at the stadium, the LSU equipment truck ran into a garage door, bending the metal out of shape and denting the truck. The gate was suspended between the tractor and the trailer, bowed from the collision.

As if that wasn’t enough, a small accident ahead of the game might have been a bad omen for the letdown of a loss that unfolded over the ensuing few hours. After Clemson ran down the hill and into the stadium in one of college football’s most electric field entrance traditions, a small fire broke out on top of the videoboard above Howard’s Rock.

An apparent mishap with the fireworks that shot off from the top of the videoboard (seen around the three-minute mark here) sent large flames and a plume of smoke into the air off the left side of the structure. One errant firework deployed horizontally. The right side appeared to deploy the fireworks as planned.

Over the ensuing minutes, the pyrotechnic setup atop the video board continued to burn. Smaller flames were visible from the stands, and smoke billowed from the structure until the blaze ceased.

The small facilities damages were secondary to the impacts of Saturday’s loss for Clemson, which may force the Tigers to be close to perfect the rest of the season if they are to reach the CFP for a second straight year. The defeat came in nonconference play, which kept the Tigers’ path to an automatic bid unharmed. But after an inaugural year of the 12-team playoff era in which no three-loss teams made the field, Clemson’s margin for error got a bit smaller just one week into the season.