Clemson Game Notes

What a way to start the season! C.J. took the opening kickoff and 96 yards later, the Tigers were up 7-0. They went on to win 37-14. Kyle Parker looked good in his debut, especially in making several key scrambles for first downs. He’s going to be exciting to watch.

The biggest concern I saw was the offensive line. This was MTSU. No disrespect to them, but we should, just based on the difference in talent, be able to move their defensive line off the ball. While we had some success running the ball (202 yards total), we still could not score from their 1 on two tries. And as noted above, Parker had to scramble several times–I can’t believe MTSU’s DBs are good enough that there was no place to go with the ball. So it comes down to blocking. Big improvement needed here.

But a win is a win and I’m sure the Tigers and Dabo are glad to get that first one out of the way. Now comes a short turn-around until the Thursday night game with Georgia Tech. Big game, not much time. Hope they’re ready. Go Tigers!

It’s a little early to be talking about getting ready for football season. Except for one thing. This year is going to be a great year for us and Clemson football. Why, you might ask? Well, for one thing, I believe Dabo is the real deal and we will see football played as it used to be played in Death Valley: focused, hard hitting, enthusiastic, downright nasty. That will be fun. But that is not the big reason. The big reason is that game weekends will be so much more fun. You see, Debbie and I have bought our dream home in the mountains. And it’s only 40 minutes from our parking space! So noon games and night games will no longer require early to rise or late to bed efforts.

Dabo’s first game as interim head coach. Four days to prepare after Tommy stepped down. Spence gone, so a whole new page and list of things to do to prepare the offense. Can you imagine the uncertainty, the confusion, the sense of “there is too much to do and not enough time to do it” that pervaded the players and staff? I’ve been involved with management changes at work. It always takes a few days minimum for everyone to stop talking about what happened and focus on the task at hand. So I’m impressed with what Dabo got accomplished. Even though the Tigers lost 21-17, they played with focus and enthusiasm. There were very few game management glitches (unneeded timeouts, delay of game penalties, etc.). There was no dissension on the bench that I saw. I consider that an amazing accomplishment of the players and staff.

But they still lost. Still had a lead in the fourth quarter and managed to let the game slip away. Still showed that the OL is the basic weakness. Still played good defense until the chips were down.

Change a few plays in any 4-point game and the outcome could have been different. Same with this one. The press and fans have highlighted the obvious plays. The holding call on Austin on the play where the Tigers moved 20 yards on 4-12. Allowing Tech to make a first down from 3-14 on its game-winning scoring drive. Allowing the go-ahead TD on a 3-6. Tech fans can point to a few of their own plays that would have made an earlier difference, like the pass right through Thomas’s hands in the endzone. The 3-14 play particularly bothers Clemson fans because we have seen this defense give up the long third-down play too many times this year.

But, in my view, the defense played well enough to win this game. The offense did not. Specifically, Cullen Harper did not. I’ve looked at this game replay, especially the fourth quarter, several times. The thing that always jumps out at me is how many non-pressured passes Harper missed. Don’t get me wrong. Harper played a good game and made several difficult plays, good throws, good scrambles. But there were three passes that were fairly simple throws. If he hits one or two of the three, the drive continues. Who knows what would happen from there. So I put this one on the offense’s shoulders more than the defense’s. But in the end, winning football requires teamwork, picking up your teammates when they are not playing their best. And neither the offense or defense can claim success in that area.

Still, I was impressed. Impressed with the focus, the enthusiasm, the aggressive play-calling (well, except for that hook-and-ladder; but, hey, if it had worked, we’d be joyfully saying, Wow, did you see that—gutsy call.)

The open date comes just in time for this team. To get together, to get healed, to get ready to beat Boston College. Go Tigers!

I watched Dabo Swinney’s first press conference, one that he had little time to prepare for after learning early yesterday morning that he was the new coach of the Tigers. Wow, just wow. The next six weeks should be fun to watch.

What a startling day yesterday was! Many fans suspected that if Tommy Bowden didn’t at least win the Atlantic Division and get to the ACC championship game, he would be fired at the end of the season. I don’t think anyone reasonably expected (maybe some hoped) that he would be gone after 6 games. But Clemson football with Tommy has always been a roller coaster, with exciting, thrilling, and sometimes depressing, changes. The changes all Clemson fans should appreciate most were not the thrilling ones, but the program ones. Bowden built a solid foundation for the program’s future.

He began harping about facility improvement from day one, years before Terry Don arrived to actually begin the building. Cynical fans used the “must be the facilities” mantra after every loss. Bowden was eventually proved right. As the facilites improved—and it was disconcerting to learn how much more Wake Forest was spending on upgrades than Clemson was—so did the recruiting. The past three recruiting classes have been some of our best in years.

Bowden led a tremendous improvement in players’ academic accomplishments. GPAs and graduation rates are among the best in college football.

Bowden always represented Clemson with class. He was classy to the end, appearing at the press conference to announce his leaving—something you almost never see in major college football. He ended his brief statement with, “I’ll be Clemson’s biggest fan on Saturday.”

There were relatively few off-the-field problems under Bowden. That is amazing in this day and time.

So there are a lot of areas where Tommy was the epitome of a great coach. But football is football and the object is to win, especially to bring home the championship occasionally. And that proved to be Bowden’s undoing. His teams lost too often when favored, lost too many of the important games, lost too many opportunities to win a championship. He leaves my beloved Tigers in good shape, much better shape than he found them 10 years ago. He leaves the program headed in the right direction. And for that, I say

Thanks, Tommy. Best of luck.

PS Here’s a link to a similar article written much better than mine: Post by TigerTide on TigerNet

My wife and I were traveling to Seattle the day of this game so I only got to watch about a half of it. It is stored on my DVR at home, so I planned to do the Game Notes next week after I got a chance to watch the whole thing. Of course, after the Tiger offense performed as they did, after Spiller went down, after we lost another offensive lineman, the prospect of watching the 12-7 defeat again was slightly nauseating. (BTW, it would have been fun to watch the defense, who played well except for one play, one drive. Unfortunately that was enough to lose the game given the offense’s pitiful showing.) And then, I was saved from the ordeal of having to watch it again. Because the details of this game became irrelevant about 11 AM, Monday, October 13. That’s when the media began to announce that Tommy Bowden had stepped down as Clemson coach. So there was something a lot more important to follow and to write about than another unexpected loss.

Tigers lost, 20-17. I could write a lot about this game, but the sportswriters have covered everything of significance better than I could. The problems and consequences were obvious. So I’ll write about something else. But before I do, I want to talk about one area that I think the sportswriters gave short shrift. They accepted that Maryland’s adjustment on defense at the half “left Spence no choice” but to go away from the running game. I don’t agree. I believe Spence looked at the alignment change of the front seven, the position of the safeties, and went away from the running game before ever fully testing whether the change would take away the run. James was fired up all day; I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look quicker. But after the first series in the second half, we quit giving him and C.J. the ball, despite the fact that on that first drive the running plays were 2 yards, 5 yards, 5 yards, 7 yards, and 2 yards. That is an average rushing gain of over 4 yards per rush. I’ll take that any day. Granted, silly penalties negated some of those rushes and put us in a passing situation, but after that drive, we went away from the running game. Who knows what would have happened had we kept pounding. But we’ll never know. We’ll only know that once again we hear our coaches talk about how adjustments by the other team affected our play calling. Strange how our adjustments in response to the other team’s never seem to have their coaches talking about us after the game!

Now the Tigers made too many mistakes to win this game. But their enthusiasm in the first half overcame mistakes, perhaps more serious mistakes than those in the second. Mistakes gave the ball to the Terps on our own 18 and 30 in the first half. No mistakes quite that serious happened in the second. Hard, enthusiastic play overcame those mistakes in the first half. What happened to that enthusiasm? Does this team have so little character, so little leadership—both from players and coaches—that one play, a long reverse, eliminated all that enthusiasm? After all, they still had a four point lead after the TD that followed that reverse. But the coaches and the team fell apart. Suddenly, we could not generate any offense and the defense slowly began to let Maryland make plays. After that it was just a matter of time.

OK, I said I was going to write about something else. That, of course, is the future. On the drive home, I, like many other fans, fumed and wondered about why this seems to keep happening. This being that the Tigers seem to start strong, whether we’re talking about a season or a game, and then fizzle. Now I know there are exceptions, like the 5-game finish several years ago that may have saved Tommy’s job. But there’s a pattern here of not living up to expectations, of not winning when you’re favored and clearly the more talented team (no disrespect to Maryland; after all, they won). So I was wondering what the stats are on that. And Larry Williams, who does a wonderful job of saying what Tiger fans are thinking, produced this line: “When ranked at home under Tommy Bowden, the Tigers have lost to unranked teams seven times.” Whoa, read that again. Think about that. Now, if I had the time, I’d love to see what percentage of games has Bowden’s Tigers lost when they were favored and ranked as well as favored and unranked. But seven losses at home to unranked teams when we were ranked. My gosh! We average 7 home games a year. We’ve played 4 this year. So out of total of 67 games, we’ve lost 7 when we were favored and ranked. And we’ve lost them to unranked teams!!!!! That’s over 10% of ALL home games. I knew there was a pattern that we didn’t win the games we were supposed to, but I never guessed it was that bad. Too many bowl games, too many overall wins to obscure that fact, I guess. That indicates a total lack of the coaching staff’s ability to motivate and inspire the team. We win some big games because the players motivate themselves. But the pattern indicates a basic problem with our coaching staff. I think it’s time for a change. Let’s accept the financial hit and the possibility that the program will stall for a year or two and make a change. As far as the financial hit, who knows, the Federal government may bail us out. As far as the other, I don’t know that it can get any worse. Time for a change.

And I suspect, if Bowden doesn’t win the ACC, Terry Don will think the same thing.

I did not go to or get to see this game. That was a little bit of a shame as it was the first meeting between Clemson and SC State. The Tigers won 54-0. That was not enough to satisfy a lot of fans, who still saw too many mistakes in pass offense and on defense to go away happy. To me, it was a good tune-up for Maryland. Go Tigers!

I expected the Tigers to win by 21 and they won by 18, 27-9. They scored on half their possessions (I didn’t count the short possessions at the end of each half). They limited the Wolfpack to scoring on only 2 of their 10 possessions, and a more accurate statement would be that they limited the Wolfpack offense to scoring on 1 of 9 possessions. The other possession was a one-play TD by the State defense after Cullen threw it right to one of their LBs on the first play of the game. The Tigers had 428 yards of offense compared to State’s 288. Based on all that, you would think I came away from the game feeling good. You would be wrong.

NC State, with the exception of its defensive front seven, is not a good football team. Too many times, State gained good yardage up the middle on the ground and over the middle through the air. Too many times, the Tigers’ OL could not keep the Wolfpack DL out of the backfield. This Tiger team has a lot of weaknesses, not all of which can be ascribed to youth and inexperience. They have one more game to get things straight before the real work begins. Spence and Koenning have got to really get moving.

All that said, a conference win is a conference win. And there were some bright spots. Brandon Thompson continues his improvement and his demonstration that he is going to be very good. The few plays that Ricky Sapp was in along with Bowers showed that our pass rush will be awesome several games from now. Hamlin is just being Hamlin, being in the right place at the right time and showing that at least one on the defense knows how to tackle. CJ is really showing his talent; some of his runs were things of beauty, showing that he only needs a little space from the line or the scheme to make big plays. And Ford seems to be back to being comfortable after his return from injury last year. Special team play was just about perfect.

So now the Tigers get what should be another chance to work on the weaknesses in a game setting. SC State will come in motivated as it’s the first shot the smaller school has ever had at the Tigers. So the Tigers will have to take care of business, which they should have no trouble doing. Go Tigers!

The Tigers had a good practice Saturday. No disrespect to the Citadel, but that’s what this game was. Even winning it 45-17, the Tigers did not show the dominance I had hoped for, given the typical talent difference between a 1-A team and a 1-AA team. (I know, it’s FBS and FCS now). But some of that may have been the constant shuffling of the OL and DL trying to find a combination that could work together effectively. Two things that did work effectively on the DL: Da’Quan Bowers and Brandon Thompson. Bowers showed why he is going to be a great one. Despite frequent double teams, his speed off the mark and in turning the corner around a tackle were impressive. Bowden said in his Sunday teleconference that we need to get more pressure on the QB. I think Sapp and Bowers will take care of that as Bowers gains more experience. But the DEs can’t take that outside rush if we are so soft up the middle that draws and QB keepers are going to be effective. Thompson will eventually take care of that. He’s big and mobile. If Scott can get his form back, the DL should be OK by the time we get to Maryland.

The OL is a different issue. They looked better against the talent level of the Bulldogs, and they should. But they still did not look dominant and the Tigers got stopped several times in short yardage situations. And now Hairston gets hurt on a moped! We don’t know today (Monday) how serious his injury is, but the line cannot afford any depletion.

The biggest immediate concern is that the Tigers cannot seem to stop intermediate passes over the middle. They finally tightened up the in third quarter, but the Citadel’s Roberts constantly hurt them getting open during the first half. Late in the game, against the second string defense–or maybe it was third–the Bulldogs scored a long TD pass over the middle. So is the problem the scheme, the talent, or just poor play? In any event, the Tigers must tighten up on the middle against good teams or their hopes of an ACC championship will be just that–a hope.

It was good to see James and CJ get untracked. Even thought the OL was not dominant, it opened enough of a hole for James and CJ to get through and they took advantage of it. Eight point two and twelve point five yards per carry ain’t too shabby, even against FCS competition.

All in all, Tiger fans came away from this one feeling better than after Alabama (how could they not?), but still wondering whether the lines are going to improve enough to allow the talented skill players to work their magic against good teams and whether the DBs and LBs can stop the passes over the middle. Stay tuned. Next week against NC State SHOULD BE another game the Tigers win and gain the experience to improve. If it’s not . . .