Just how many Infinity Stones does it take for Syracuse football to defeat Clemson?

The Syracuse Orange play the Clemson Tigers on Saturday, and things will not be pretty. The Orange will need a miracle to win.

Because we’ve significantly rotted everyone’s brains enough with our Marvel content, OrangeHO asked the question we should have been asking all along: How many Infinity Stones will it take to defeat Clemson. If you want the sparknotes, John had them in his response, but as the resident “Guy who is literally paid to know Marvel,” I am here to unequivocally give the absolute correct answer.*

Time Stone: The only stone that I do not think ‘Cuse could wield by itself and win the game, which is unfortunate since they do have a Sorcerer Supreme on the bench. To date, the movies have shown that unless you are Earth’s mightiest mage, the effects are limited to a single object. However, if Mang wanted to, he could create a time loop to trap Dormammu I mean Dabo, an idea David Rothgery floated.

Reality Stone: The ability to rewrite reality as you see fit, it’s power wasn’t fully realized until Thanos wielded in Infinity War. (Again, more proof Dark World is just the worst.) You could have Dino chilling on the sidelines, letting the refs, camera crew, and Syracuse team seeing what’s actually happening while trapping Clemson in some alternate reality where they are doing well, allowing ‘Cuse to easily win. However, this would require some elaborate timing and planning by Dino, and there are better Stones to get.

Mind Stone: Similar to the Reality Stone, this requires some trickery. After you pull this Stone from Vision’s corpse, you have a couple different options. We’ve seen that the stone gave Wanda Maximoff the ability to manipulate thoughts and emotions, while Loki used the Stone in his staff to directly take over minds. One could image a powerful enough will could use the stone to enslave all of Clemson to an easy win, or more directly, get Dabo to forfeit. Just waiting for the NCAA to create some sort of rule for this, but not paying student athletes...

Space Stone: John had it right: just teleport Clemson somewhere else. A truly evil plan would be to continually transport the Clemson buses that ride from their locker room to the stadium back to the starting point in an endless loop, or to the other side of the country. If for some reason your tesseract is still in the pocket dimension your Flerken is keeping it in and isn’t available until after kickoff, just use the stone to allow Rex Cullpepper to walk into the endzone on every snap.

Power Stone: The most obvious and easy stone to win with, you give it to Sean Tucker on offense and McKinley Williams on defense. Tucker will score on every possession, while Williams will blow up the entire line and sack Trevor Lawrence on every play.

You may have realized that the Soul Stone was not mentioned, as the Stone’s true power has not been revealed on screen. However, what has been made clear is that you must trade a soul to get it, specifically what you love most. To spare Dino an unspeakable choice, we as TNIAAM would go to Vormir to make a deal with the Red Skull. We would trade what we love most, the gift that keeps giving, the one thing that allows us to create content at any time: GERG.

*These answers will almost assuredly not be correct as Eternals or some movie will retcon all of this.

This is why you don’t give Marvel nerds a sports blog.