We lost this game in the first half, and really the first quarter. We made 3 games worth of huge mistakes in the opening 6 minutes. When I say huge mistakes, I am ignoring things like poor reads, missed blocking assignments, poor tackling or busted coverage assignments. By huge mistakes, I mean things like:
- Personal foul roughing the punter (in a situation where simply running into the kicker would not have been a first down). Most puzzling on that play was how he managed not to block the punt.
- Personal foul late hit out of bounds on their first punt return. This was dumb for two reasons. One, the runner had taken about three steps out of bounds before the hit. Two, Egbuniwe didn’t really even hit him that hard. I mean, if you are going to get a late hit, at least get your 15 yards worth.
- Hill dropping a touchdown pass that hit him in the facemask. That was third and 10 from Clemson’s 40, and we punted after that. So that just takes 7 points off the board.
(In other news, Stephen Hill is wearing on me. He had two drops today and also gave up an interception. Granted, the interception probably didn’t matter, as it was with 3 minutes left and we were down by 14. But it was only picked off because the defender was able to tip it, and that was because Hill jumped up in the air but for some reason tried to catch the ball at his waist. Go up with your hands Hill! You are 6’5. Go get the ball. It was thrown well. Make a play.)
Anyway, those three are the only huge mistakes that stand out, but I remember thinking to myself at the time that there were others. I will make a comprehensive list when I review the tape.
Those huge mistakes were all unforced by Clemson, and they swung the game by at least 14 points, and probably more. If Stephen Hill catches that pass, and then any one of the following 3 things happen:
1 – We don’t rough the punter
2 – We don’t completely whiff two tackles on Ellington’s long run
3 – The ref calls the obvious hold on one of our linebackers on Ellington’s long run…
Then the game is 7-3 when Hill makes his catch, and is 10-10 at halftime. And its not like I am going through the game and saying “well if we simply hadn’t made all of these mistakes…”. Fixing those three plays is far from playing a perfect game. I don’t expect us to be perfect. But piling up stupid plays like that can really kill you, especially on the road against a pretty talented team. I think your average college team can expect to not make any mistakes like those in a normal half. Or certainly not make 5 or 6 like we did.
Other than that, the game was not nearly as bad as it looked. We still have plenty of problems. Our defense is too easy to block and does not tackle well. Not much Groh can do about that, so I have a hard time blaming the coaching. You have to make yourself hard to block and make tackles. Offensively, our offensive line did not compete very well. Clemson has a very good D line, but we could have made it a little harder on them. Even as poorly as we blocked, we still had chances, but when you don’t block well, you have to execute the rest of your offense very well, and we didn’t. Nesbitt missed several reads. (I am starting to think that he does not trust anyone but himself to carry the ball on third down because he keeps the ball himself so often on third when other reads are pretty obvious). He also missed some pitches I thought were there and some gives to Allen that he should have made.
Don’t get me wrong, Nesbitt played a good game. The bigger problems were the blocking, our tackling on defense, and throwing the game away in the first quarter with those mistakes. But Nesbitt did make some errors, and if he had not, we may well have been in it because we moved the ball well enough to get a few touchdowns if we had made proper reads consistently.
Overall a very disappointing loss. But what does it mean for the rest of the season? Well, it really has little effect on either of our top two goals of 1 – winning the conference and 2 – beating UGA. Yes, it does hurt our conference record, but look at it this way. We probably needed to beat VT and Miami even if we beat Clemson. And now, if we beat Miami and VT, all we need is the winner of VT – UNC to lose one other time. That could very well happen. So if we win out, I like our chances.
But will we win out? Well we sure don’t look very good. Clemson may well be the most talented team we will face all season, and they did appear to play a decent game. Their receivers certainly played better, and their defense had a good game. It is possible that with the bye week, we could make some improvements and get a few wins down the stretch.
But, for now, let’s just say I am not real confident. We need to improve a lot.
However, we did have an up and down season in 2008 just like this year, and that ended pretty well. We lost a game at UNC in which we looked terrible (much like today) and then beat FSU, Miami and UGA, which pretty much no one gave us a chance to do after losing to UNC. Also, the last time we were beaten soundly at Clemson, 2006, we won the Coastal.
So there is hope, but things need to change.
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