It's easy to see why Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney has weather delays on his mind this week.

"I just hope we can just play a regulation game and not have to have any delays or anything," he said on Sept. 29.

The Tigers (3-1, 2-0 ACC) have already had three. They delayed kickoffs against LSU and Georgia Southern and paused the North Carolina game in the fourth quarter.

Clemson's game against No. 4 Miami (4-0, 2-0) on Oct. 3 (7:30 p.m., ABC) may be the fourth, as The Weather Channel forecasts around an 80% chance of rain and thunderstorms.

Clemson isn't sure what the record is for the most total weather delays it's faced in a season, but another weather delay against the Hurricanes would set a Memorial Stadium record for three delayed home games this season. Two were delayed last season.

The repeated interruptions might make it seem as though Clemson can't escape bad weather, so what's going on? Experts said there are several explanations.

Why does Clemson football keep getting weather delays?

Kendra Kent is the chief meteorologist at Fox Carolina, a local news station based in Greenville. She said the weather delays in the Georgia Southern and UNC games were caused by late-day, heat-induced thunderstorms.

That's a pattern Kent said usually settles down in September, but one that can linger. According to data gathered from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Clemson University station, the average temperature for August 2026 (79.9°F) was 4.9°F warmer than August 2025. Weather Underground reports the average temperature for September 2026 (75.6°F) was 3.5°F warmer than September 2025.

"We have been warmer than normal, so that has added to the volatility of the storm environment," Kent said.

Jake Grant, another Fox Carolina meteorologist, said Clemson's proximity to the Blue Ridge Mountains plays a role when winds come from the north and northwest. Storms that roll off the mountains toward Clemson can be higher in the atmosphere before tapping into a more unstable air mass as they move south.

"When we don't have large-scale weather systems moving through, and we get the heat-driven storms, the localized winds act as the steering current," Grant said. "That's why a lot of the storms take off once they move out of North Carolina and into South Carolina."

Is El Niño behind Clemson football weather delays?

El Niño, a periodic warming of waters in the tropical Pacific Ocean, can shift weather patterns thousands of miles away. In South Carolina, it tends to push the jet stream farther south, creating a wetter and more active weather pattern during the fall and winter.

Trisha Palmer, the warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service's Greenville-Spartanburg station, said we're in a "very strong" El Niño pattern, which could be record-breaking through the winter.

For three straight years, September was one of Clemson's three wettest months. NWS data provided by Palmer show Clemson University received 5.78 inches of precipitation in September 2022, 5.9 inches in 2023 and 10.23 inches in 2024 before the total dropped to 1.87 inches in September 2025.

According to Weather Underground, Clemson received 6.16 inches of precipitation in September 2026.

"It is very typical to have storms in the late summer and into the early fall ... and with the strong El Niño in place, we will continue to trend wet into the winter," Palmer said.

But El Niño doesn't explain every storm.

Lee Lindler is a professor of atmospheric physics at the College of Charleston, home to South Carolina's only meteorology degree program. He said Clemson’s run of weather delays could be connected to El Niño, but there’s no way to pin the individual storms on one cause.

"This pattern would either be mostly random chance, or it could also be related to the strong El Niño currently going on in the Pacific," Lindler said. "There has been a loose correlation noted between El Niño and rainfall, but to definitively attribute these specific events to El Niño would be malpractice."

Bad weather and bad timing for Clemson football

As for why storms keep arriving on game days? That may simply be bad luck.

"It is not a climate shift; it just happens to be that these storms have impacted the Clemson area itself and just happened to be on the weekends," Palmer said.

Palmer described those storms as "unorganized convection." Without a larger forcing mechanism, meteorologists can't say well in advance exactly where these storms will develop. That explains why a forecast might show that storms are possible without pinpointing whether lightning will reach Memorial Stadium during a game.

Kent said the upcoming forecast is more typical for this time of year. Instead of purely heat-driven thunderstorms, it's associated with a front and moisture from the Pacific and Gulf. Timing and dry air from the northeast make the forecast tricky, but Kent said there's a chance of bad weather around kickoff for Clemson-Miami.

"Initially, it looked like we could see up to 3 inches of rain between Saturday and Sunday. Now it's looking like closer to 1 inch," Kent said. "But still the threat of showers and storms around game time."

Nick Coppola covers Clemson athletics for The Greenville News and the USA Today Network. Email him at ncoppola@usatodayco.com, follow him on X @Nick_Coppola__ and like his Facebook page at Nick Coppola, Clemson Sports.

This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Experts explain Clemson football's weather delays with another possible vs Miami