(Ran originally in Sunday’s March 3, 2019 editions of The Times and The News-Star.)

Behind every good band is a good biscuit. Or two. Or 800.

Let us share a secret with you…

It’s been almost two months now and no one but the Clemson football fans are thinking about it anymore, about how their Tigers dough-popped Notre Dame and then Alabama to win this season’s college football national championship.

Clemson did it behind a truism that has always been and will forever be: they ate more chicken.

“I’m not saying we’re responsible for Clemson winning the national championship, but…” said Jeremy Telford, operator of the Chick-Fil-A on Interstate 20 westbound in Ruston.

But … what if Clemson’s band hadn’t been fed that rainy morning on their way to Arlington, Texas to help their football Tigers route Notre Dame, 30-3, in the Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic and College Football Playoff Semifinal?

What if Clemson’s band had come out of the gate hungry and flat? Would the football team have done the same thing? I mean, you know what they say, an army runs on its stomach. So does a good band.

Well, we’ll never know because as so often happens in life, some good people and some good chicken saved the day.

What happened was, a week before Clemson’s eight tour busses cruised down I-20 toward the semifinal game, Ms. Lee Maiden, administrative assistant for Clemson University Bands, placed a call to Jeremy’s business and asked if he’d be willing to feed breakfast to 388 people at a convenient location. Hmmmm…

“You can imagine the confusion and heart attacks of trying to get eight busses and 400 people into the restaurant,” Jeremy said. “Doug got to thinking…”

Doug Gibbons, then the Kitchen Director and now the restaurant’s Senior Director of Operations, was “the brains behind making this happen,” Jeremy said. Doug played some college ball as an offensive lineman and knows his way around a pigskin. And a chicken biscuit.

Why not, he figured, meet at the rest area near Choudrant, eight miles east of Ruston? He could feed the band, who’d have been on the road about 10 hours through the night, giving them enough body fuel to make the four-and-a-half hours more to Arlington.

And on a rainy morning about 7 o’clock, that’s exactly what they did.

It took about a dozen people to make it happen on Ruston’s end. A couple reported for work at 3 a.m., a few more at 4, the rest at 5:30. One was cutting biscuits, one was making eggs, a couple putting the protein in the biscuits, another wrapping, one breading chicken, two sacking, one on coffee, one doing quality control, a controlled chicken chaos.

When the smoke and grease had cleared around 6:30 a.m., Doug loaded his SUV and headed toward Choudrant to meet the band, who’d contacted the restaurant as they were crossing the Mississippi River, right on schedule. With Doug were 448 chicken biscuits, 238 bacon, egg, and cheese biscuits, 105 sausage biscuits, 11 butter biscuits, a mixture of 31 different meals for vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and lactose-free guests, and two large 96-ounces coffee containers.

“In the pouring rain, he used extreme caution,” Jeremy said. “No one wants to imagine a wreck on interstate with 802 biscuits.”

Doug pulled under a pavilion and four busses each pulled along either side of his SUV. Meals were laid out and band members, some in PJs, some in cowboy hats and no shirts, some in sweats and T-shirts, snatched up bags with precision, as if performing a halftime routine, and climbed back into the busses.

“You could tell from the minute Ms. Maiden called until the busses left Choudrant,” Doug said, “this wasn’t their first rodeo.”

The busses were in the rest area 40 minutes max, then off toward Texas.

“The Chick-fil-A in Ruston went out of their way to feed the Tiger Band breakfast and make them feel welcome,” Lee told me on the phone after her team had won the national championship, its second in three years. “It was really great working with them; as you can imagine, feeding 380 hungry students is a huge order!”

Typically, the restaurant sells around 500 biscuits on a Friday and Saturday, around 400 on each weekday. So this tripled that. “Rolled every one of those biscuits myself,” said Doug, who, let’s face it, is a stud.

In full disclosure, I’ve known Jeremy for more than 10 years and grew up surrounded by Clemson people and went to school with Tim Renfro, father of Clemson receiver Hunter Renfro, plus all of Hunter’s aunts and uncles back when we were little people.

And we all grew up around chickens. So I thought it was a neat story to tell about people and animals I am fans of. Plus, no chickens were harmed in the writing of this column.

“I’m glad they chose us,” Doug said, “and glad we could make it happen.”

Clemson’s band made it happen too. So did the football team. Just ask Alabama.

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