CLEMSON — It’s been almost a week, can we talk now?
The affected area is still sore, owing to the depth of the wound that pierced the body and damaged the heart, so we need to be careful.
There’s no reason to react to the end of Clemson’s football season with any great degree of shock, or with a suggestion that the sky is falling and everything’s wrong, everyone has to go and all the deck chairs on this ship need to be replaced.
The historic fourth consecutive loss to the rival is in the books; the world knows that the 2012 edition was eventually exposed as paper Tigers, good enough to stand up against diminished competition in the Atlantic Coast Conference, not good enough to stand up against the stiff breezes offered by South Carolina and Florida State
.
So that’s where the football program at Clemson finds itself after Year 2 of the Chad Morris Experiment – an explosive offense that needs to play uwith a certain formulaic approach to have a chance to win.
Most teams aren’t good enough to build a fence around the play-fast offense Morris designs, but that’s not really the issue at Clemson.
The question should have something to do with how to beat the teams that can build that fence, teams like Florida State and South Carolina. In its present composition, this football team isn’t prepared to do that, and that’s going to be a problem.
The concept of a Clemson football team failing to live up to its own expectations isn’t anything new to Tigers’ fans. It is such a well-known phenomena that ESPN broadcaster Kirk Herbstreit filled one of his online Q-and-A commercials – sponsored by an insurance company – this preseason with a response to a query about which is the toughest team to root for.
You can still find it easily on YouTube if you fill in a search for “Kirk Herbstreit on the toughest team to root for.”
Spoiler alert, Herbstreit identified Clemson as the toughest team to root for, based on the end-of-season routine that almost always sees the Tigers fall short of their goals.
Sure, that happens to lots of teams, but the Clemson issue is highlighted by the habitual practice of the school and its coaches touting the recruiting classes, followed by a chorus of cheering from the fan websites and Tiger Nation falls for it again.
It’s a problem in the latest version of Clemson Hope Never Dies, based on the observable facts nationally in college football that relate to the decision by Coach Dabo Swinney to go all in with the play-fast offense at the expense of a defensive approach.
Set aside the fact that this all-offense approach runs counter to Clemson tradition of defensively tough teams, because this is the latest trend. These offenses can generate a lot of yards and points and they have an attraction to many offensive players coming out of high school.
We all understand by now that the play-fast approach collects statistics at the expense of a team’s defense for the obvious reason that defenses are forced on the field much more often in these high-tempo approaches.
If you look at the national statistics this week, the highest-ranked defense among the play-fast teams is Arizona State, 27. Tulsa is 33, Oregon 46, Texas A&M 53 and Clemson 75. The bottom half of the defensive totals nationally are filled with many of the play-fast offenses.
Among the Top 15 defenses, you find Alabama (first), Florida State (second), Florida (fifth), Notre Dame (sixth), LSU (ninth), South Carolina (13th).
There’s no question that playing fast is trendy and that some schools, most notably Oregon, have achieved high levels of success. There’s another question pertinent to football at Clemson.
Namely, is this the best way to go for the team that plays at Death Valley?
Florida State, the team Clemson has to beat to win its division, and South Carolina, the team Swinney is going to have to eventually beat to keep his job, both have an approach that can consume the jet sweeps, bubble screens and all the other sideways motion gimmicks that typically start the Tigers’ offense.
Even Steve Spurrier, who lit up the Southeastern Conference in the 1990s with an offense that highlighted a clever passing attack, has since realized that to win big, you better start with defense
.
More importantly, you need an offense and a defense that can work in unison and enhance each other rather than working against each other.
It’s a problem at Clemson when the team is ahead 50-24 in the third quarter, as was the case this season at home against North Carolina State, and the offense continues to play as fast as possible, ignoring the clock. At the end, it was 62-48, but had they used the clock as the ally it is supposed to be, the Tigers might have prevented those last 24 points in the second half.
Florida State and Carolina understand the value of the clock and when they get a three-score lead, they snap the ball just before the play clock expires, reducing the number of available plays, draining away chances of a comeback, play after play.
All of that is over now because Morris is expected to accept a head-coaching job somewhere in the next few days or weeks. The question for Swinney shifts to what happens next?
Will he find another coach to play fast and just hope it works out differently against the defensive bullies? Does he want to be Oregon of the ACC?
Actually, that might be the team Clemson has already become, something like Oregon only in the Southeast, not the Northwest.
The Ducks got close again to a Pac-12 championship and a berth in the conference championship game, but fell short.
If you missed it, Oregon lost to Stanford, a team that plays like Florida State of the West Coast.
link: http://www.greenvill...lar|text|SPORTS
The affected area is still sore, owing to the depth of the wound that pierced the body and damaged the heart, so we need to be careful.
There’s no reason to react to the end of Clemson’s football season with any great degree of shock, or with a suggestion that the sky is falling and everything’s wrong, everyone has to go and all the deck chairs on this ship need to be replaced.
The historic fourth consecutive loss to the rival is in the books; the world knows that the 2012 edition was eventually exposed as paper Tigers, good enough to stand up against diminished competition in the Atlantic Coast Conference, not good enough to stand up against the stiff breezes offered by South Carolina and Florida State
.
So that’s where the football program at Clemson finds itself after Year 2 of the Chad Morris Experiment – an explosive offense that needs to play uwith a certain formulaic approach to have a chance to win.
Most teams aren’t good enough to build a fence around the play-fast offense Morris designs, but that’s not really the issue at Clemson.
The question should have something to do with how to beat the teams that can build that fence, teams like Florida State and South Carolina. In its present composition, this football team isn’t prepared to do that, and that’s going to be a problem.
The concept of a Clemson football team failing to live up to its own expectations isn’t anything new to Tigers’ fans. It is such a well-known phenomena that ESPN broadcaster Kirk Herbstreit filled one of his online Q-and-A commercials – sponsored by an insurance company – this preseason with a response to a query about which is the toughest team to root for.
You can still find it easily on YouTube if you fill in a search for “Kirk Herbstreit on the toughest team to root for.”
Spoiler alert, Herbstreit identified Clemson as the toughest team to root for, based on the end-of-season routine that almost always sees the Tigers fall short of their goals.
Sure, that happens to lots of teams, but the Clemson issue is highlighted by the habitual practice of the school and its coaches touting the recruiting classes, followed by a chorus of cheering from the fan websites and Tiger Nation falls for it again.
It’s a problem in the latest version of Clemson Hope Never Dies, based on the observable facts nationally in college football that relate to the decision by Coach Dabo Swinney to go all in with the play-fast offense at the expense of a defensive approach.
Set aside the fact that this all-offense approach runs counter to Clemson tradition of defensively tough teams, because this is the latest trend. These offenses can generate a lot of yards and points and they have an attraction to many offensive players coming out of high school.
We all understand by now that the play-fast approach collects statistics at the expense of a team’s defense for the obvious reason that defenses are forced on the field much more often in these high-tempo approaches.
If you look at the national statistics this week, the highest-ranked defense among the play-fast teams is Arizona State, 27. Tulsa is 33, Oregon 46, Texas A&M 53 and Clemson 75. The bottom half of the defensive totals nationally are filled with many of the play-fast offenses.
Among the Top 15 defenses, you find Alabama (first), Florida State (second), Florida (fifth), Notre Dame (sixth), LSU (ninth), South Carolina (13th).
There’s no question that playing fast is trendy and that some schools, most notably Oregon, have achieved high levels of success. There’s another question pertinent to football at Clemson.
Namely, is this the best way to go for the team that plays at Death Valley?
Florida State, the team Clemson has to beat to win its division, and South Carolina, the team Swinney is going to have to eventually beat to keep his job, both have an approach that can consume the jet sweeps, bubble screens and all the other sideways motion gimmicks that typically start the Tigers’ offense.
Even Steve Spurrier, who lit up the Southeastern Conference in the 1990s with an offense that highlighted a clever passing attack, has since realized that to win big, you better start with defense
.
More importantly, you need an offense and a defense that can work in unison and enhance each other rather than working against each other.
It’s a problem at Clemson when the team is ahead 50-24 in the third quarter, as was the case this season at home against North Carolina State, and the offense continues to play as fast as possible, ignoring the clock. At the end, it was 62-48, but had they used the clock as the ally it is supposed to be, the Tigers might have prevented those last 24 points in the second half.
Florida State and Carolina understand the value of the clock and when they get a three-score lead, they snap the ball just before the play clock expires, reducing the number of available plays, draining away chances of a comeback, play after play.
All of that is over now because Morris is expected to accept a head-coaching job somewhere in the next few days or weeks. The question for Swinney shifts to what happens next?
Will he find another coach to play fast and just hope it works out differently against the defensive bullies? Does he want to be Oregon of the ACC?
Actually, that might be the team Clemson has already become, something like Oregon only in the Southeast, not the Northwest.
The Ducks got close again to a Pac-12 championship and a berth in the conference championship game, but fell short.
If you missed it, Oregon lost to Stanford, a team that plays like Florida State of the West Coast.
link: http://www.greenvill...lar|text|SPORTS
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