What does Clemson think about Virginia and Miami?
Okay, here's the story on orange as a color in the southeast (excluding Tenn.).
After its first season of football in 1888, UVa students at a pep rally decided to change their colors from silver gray and cardinal red (for the blood on the Confederate soldiers uniforms when they came home from The War) to the navy blue and orange of the scarf that a student got at a rowing regatta at Oxford because the red dye ran in the red clay mud. In a DVD about the history of UVa football, they show a piece of the original scarf that's in the collection of the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond. We've worn navy blue and orange since then.
One of our alumni who played for the 1889 team became the first football coach at Auburn, so they adopted the navy blue and orange as well (even though they decided to adopt the tiger as their mascot). One of his Auburn players became the first coach at Clemson. They decided to adopt the tiger as their mascot. That Auburn alum's blue and orange gear had faded a bit from the sun, so the blue looked purple, so Clemson took purple and orange as their colors.
A Gainesville, Florida, store owner was interested in selling pennants, knickknacks, etc. for the UFlorida Gators. He was visiting Charlottesville and saw a bunch of UVa items in a store that were exactly what he thought he wanted to sell. So, he bought them and had them reproduced in a factory and told them it was OK to make them blue and orange, so UF adopted blue and orange that way. Nowadays, they use a lighter blue on their unis than the navy blue used up to the 60s.
Somewhere along the line VPI adopted maroon and orange as their colors, mostly using the maroon.
So, WE gave the southeast some color based on blue coupled with orange as school colors. Clemson uses orange a lot, but doesn't own it. If anyone does down this way, we do.