Week 8 Review - Clemson

Needless to say, the Clemson game was very disappointing. The most frustrating part was how much we beat ourselves.

Before we get into that, I’d like to make one point. Clemson is a good team. Yes, they have 4 losses. Yes the latest one was a somewhat embarrassing loss to Boston College. I don’t care. Like a lot of teams in the ACC, they seem to underachieve, but they are clearly capable of playing pretty well. And they did play a pretty good game against us. So I do not mean to take anything away from their performance.

However, you cannot watch that game and conclude anything other than we really made an unusual number of big mistakes that gave Clemson a lot of help. Before the game, I believed that if we played well, we could make it a good game, and we could win. I still believe that. But we lack the talent this year to overcome the kind, and number, of mistakes we made.

Here is a breakdown by half. I’ll classify these mistakes as either “Come on, Man!” or “seriously… I mean, seriously”. The latter being the bigger errors. To give you an idea of how much help we gave Clemson, I think a typical team should have about 2 or 3 “come on mans” per game, and about 10 “seriously… I mean, seriously” mistakes per season.

First Half.

“seriously…, I mean, seriously?”

- Roughing the punter. Normally this would be only a “come on man”, but on this play Sweeting probably should have blocked the punt easily. He may in fact have gotten a piece of it barely, but it was not “indisputable” so the call could not be overturned. Anyway, given how close he got to him, I don’t know how the ball wasn’t hammered backwards into Clemson’s end zone. So this mistake was huge.

- Late hit on punt return. Again this would not be a huge mistake normally, but the circumstances made it one. The Clemson runner had taken literally 3 steps out of bounds. Really inexcusable.

-Sylvester’s non sack. He blitzes and gets great pressure, and should have had Parker for an 8 yard loss. This play was especially bad because not only does Sylvester do a very poor job tackling, but he also fails to wrap up the QB’s throwing arm. After a full second of being held, but not wrapped up or tackled, Parker flips the ball out to his RB, who takes off and turns the play into a positive gain. Ends up being 2^nd and 3 instead of 2^nd and 18.

“come on man!”

- Playing freeze tag on the TD run immediately following the roughing the punter. We had two potential tacklers. The first whiffed an arm tackle. I don’t necessarily expect a tackle there, but if he at least hit him and slowed him down, others would have gotten there. Nope. Almost a complete whiff. Even so, a couple of guys got close enough to make a play. Most notably was Mario Butler #2, who got to within arms reach of Ellington, but strangely just didn’t grab him. He kept running with him, I guess hoping to get even closer? Well, too bad Ellington is faster than Butler, so he quickly lost half a step and no longer could grab him. I was totally confused by why he didn’t even try to tackle him. He was right next to him for a step and a half. (side note: we did get screwed on this play, as they pretty clearly held Jefferson and so it should have been first and 20. Oh well. Still gotta tackle. Refs miss holds sometimes).

- Hill dropping the TD pass. I went back and forth, but ultimately decided to put this in the not so bad category because Hill did a good job getting his body into position for the catch (looked a lot like Thomas on that part actually) and he was staring into the sun. But still, the pass hit him in the upper chest/facemask area, and it was third and ten. That was 7 points we just took right off the board. Killer.

- Johnson failing to down the punt at the 1 yard line. He was standing right there, camped under it, ready to make a catch, and he just whiffed. This is also in the lesser mistake category only because he was looking back into the sun. But you still have to make the play. Burying Clemson at the 1 would have given us a good chance to hold them and force a punt from the end zone (they are limited in what they can run from their own end zone, most teams just run straight ahead for a play or two to get a little space).

- Nesbitt with a very poor pitch to Roddy Jones, which Roddy scrambled back to get for a loss of 9. This was an especially bad mistake, because the play looked promising. This was partially forced by Clemson, as they got penetration, but I think Nesbitt had time to react. He was just a little slow, and then compounded the problem by throwing a bad pitch. If he recognizes faster, the pitch is easier, but he should have made it anyway.

- Extending into the second half, Nesbitt missed a very easy read, and missed it badly, on third and 4 from inside Clemson’s ten. Nesbitt missed many reads this game, which is to be expected. He maybe had a worse game than usual in terms of reads, but I don’t expect him to be perfect. However, this read was obvious… the dive was wide open. Allen probably gets the first down, but at least gets close, and we probably go for it on 4^th and short. Instead, Nesbitt was swarmed under (everyone was going for him and leaving Allen) for a loss of 2, and we kicked a FG to make it 17-6 instead of 17-10.

So, there you have it. 8 “major” mistakes, 7 in the first half alone. I would say 2 of these kind of mistakes would be an average game, 3 is bad. 8 is awful, and was a big part of the reason we lost. 3 of these mistakes, the TD drop and the combination of roughing the punter and playing freeze tag on the ensuing run by Ellington, directly cost us 14 points. That was the margin of the game right there.

Obviously, we made many more minor mistakes throughout the game, as all teams do. I do not expect us to be perfect. But I also do not expect us to throw the game away in the first half.

Given all of that, I was proud (upon watching the tape… was too angry during the game to notice) that we fought back to 24-13 and got the ball back at our own 45 early in the 4^th quarter. We got to Clemson’s 35 before bogging down. Take that in for a TD and we are right back in the game. I think that is impressive after digging ourselves a 17 point hole. To be fair, Clemson deserves a little credit for taking advantage, but really not much. If we play an average game mentally (catch the TD pass, don’t rough the punter etc) that game should have been 7-7 or 10-7 Clemson when it was 17-0. So we did basically dig that 17 point hole by ourselves.

You just can’t play like that and win, especially on the road, unless you are the much, much better team.

As for the rest of the game, my summation is that we got outplayed on both lines, and overall Clemson has better athletes. We only lost by 14 (remember we basically threw away 14 points) because Paul Johnson is a much better coach than Dabo. If we play our average game, that comes down to the wire, which should embarrass Clemson’s coaching staff given they won the battle in the trenches by a decent margin and were playing at home.

Here is a look at the numbers. There is not actually that much of a margin in my opinion. The commentators seemed shocked that the stats at half were not completely lopsided (approximately 250 to 180 yards). For some reason, they seemed to ignore the fact that we were throwing the game away.

GT First Half Drives

Start	Plays	Yards	Yards/ Play	3rd downs converted	4th downs converted	End	Result
GT 25	3	0	0	0	0	GT 25	Punt
GT 20	5	50	8	0	0	CU 40	Punt
GT 17	4	18	4.5	0	0	GT 35	Punt
GT 12	13	53	4.1	1 (5 yd)	1 (3 yd)	CU 35	Downs
GT 20	15	71	4.7			CU 9	FG

You can see that besides the first drive, we moved the ball pretty well. The second drive should have been a TD, and the last one could have been as well with marginally better execution inside their ten yard line. From watching the tape, it didn’t appear that we had any major execution issues overall, aside from a few isolated poor plays. We just could not block their line very well, so it ended up being something of a guessing game. If we made the right read on the option quickly, we could move the ball some. However, they were beating our blocks badly enough that they were sometimes able to take away all three runners. Even when they could not do that, they were aggressively getting into the backfield, and attacking Nesbitt. I liked their strategy of trying to guess keep or dive rather than just taking one and making it obvious. By doing this, they gave up a couple of 20-30 yard dive plays, but they forced a lot of negative plays that really put us in some bad spots. They also keyed on Nesbitt, who I think is our best runner. So their defensive game plan I thought was actually pretty good.

Clemson First Half Drives

Start	Plays	Yards	Yards/ Play	3rd downs converted	4th downs converted	End	Result
CU 24	3	6	2	0	0	CU 30	Punt
CU 45	1	55	55	0	0	GT 0	TD
GT 45	8	33	4.1	1 (3 yd)	0	GT 12	FG Miss
CU 20	11	60	5.5	2 (3, 3 yd)	0	GT 20	FG
CU 26	6	74	12.33	0	0	GT 0	TD
CU 35	6	21	3.5	1 (5 yd)	0	GT 44	Punt

I counted the first drive as a “drive” even though we roughed the punter, because I don’t put that on the defense. Anyway, I had no major problem with our defensive scheme. We did a poor job of clogging the middle, which is pretty common, but the real problem was very poor tackling. We gave up a handful of third down conversions, and an awful lot of extra yards, with some very poor tackling sprinkled throughout the game.

With the exception of the two TD drives, we played pretty good “bend but don’t break” defense. And the first TD drive was one play of simply atrocious tackling. Some of the poor tackling should be a credit to Clemson’s runners being hard to tackle, but many times, including the 55 yard TD run, I thought our guys did not appear to be playing with much energy.

GT Second Half Drives

Start	Plays	Yards	Yards/ Play	3rd downs converted	4th downs converted	End	Result
GT 25	11	66	6	1 (1 yd)	0	CU 9	FG
GT 22	14	78	5.6	2 (11, 10 yd)	2 (2, 6 yd)	CU 0	TD
GT 44	5	24	4.8	0	0	CU 32	FG Miss
GT 35	1	0	0	0	0	GT 35	INT

Pretty good offense in the second half. If Nesbitt makes the right read on third down (and this is the play where the read was OBVIOUS) inside their ten yard line on the first drive, we would have scored two TD’s on our first two drives. We certainly moved the ball well. Daquan Bowers made some really good plays on the third drive to stop us once we get into Clemson territory.

Clemson Second Half Drives

Start	Plays	Yards	Yards/ Play	3rd downs converted	4th downs converted	End	Result
CU 31	8	69	8.6	2 (6, 6 yd)	0	GT 0	TD
CU 21	3	0	0	0	0	CU 21	Punt
CU 32	15	64	4.3	2 (1, 12 yd)	0	GT 4	FG

More very uninspired looking football on defense in the second half. The first drive ended with a pitiful effort to tackle Ellington. Butler (I think it was Butler) basically fell over backwards from backpedaling at his own goalline. I don’t care if you miss the tackle, but when your back is to your end zone, press forward a little bit and try to hit him. It was third down, and we had a chance to force a field goal. The way we tried to tackle him, even if we got him to the ground (which we didn’t) it would have been in the end zone. Awful.

And then the third drive is where we let them run out 8 minutes, including converting a 3^rd and 12 or so when we had to at least suspect they were gonna run. And the did. Between the tackles. For 15 yards. Sigh.

First Half

GT		Clemson
9	First Downs Allowed	11
8	Third Downs Forced	9
4	Third Downs Stopped	6

Not much to talk about here. Third down conversions (obviously) are huge, and Clemson stopped us 2/3 of the time. We only stopped them half the time.

Second Half

GT		Clemson
8	First Downs Allowed	8
7	Third Downs Forced	7
2	Third Downs Stopped	4

More of the same. They stopped us twice as often as we stopped them. Gotta make the plays.

Here is a look at the game stats:

	GT	Clemson
Rush Yards	242	236
Yards Per Carry	4.9	6.2
Pass Yards	83	167
Yards Per Attempt	4.2	6.2
Total Yards	325	403
Yards Per Play	4.8	6.2
Points	13	27
Turnovers	1	0

The biggest edge goes to Clemson in terms of yards per play. Ellington’s two big runs, 55 and 42 yards, helped make that margin so big. Other than yards per play, the stats look mostly even. Clemson was able to out perform us in the trenches, and that made it easier for them in our red zone and very tough for us in theirs. That, along with all of our mental errors in the first half, was the difference in the game.

What does this mean for the rest of our season? Well, hopefully not much at all. Even if we did not have very good coaches, I would not expect us to have a game where we made so many silly mental mistakes again. We simply played a remarkably poor game in that regard, and it should be our worst of the season. I would certainly expect us to be a little mentally sharper out of a bye week.

As far as our ability to compete in the trenches, Clemson is probably the best D line we will play all season. Miami is also very good, and UGA is not too far behind, but it should not be a huge concern that we struggled against the Tigers. As long as we continue to improve in terms of knowing our blocking assignments and executing them quickly and correctly, we should be fine on offense the rest of the way. Provided that we start catching the ball anyway… Its hard to keep running when teams know you can’t throw, and if you can’t catch, you have no threat of being able to throw.

The D line is a bigger concern. Clemson’s O line is not that good. We competed ok at times, but Clemson won that battle, and we are likely to see better O lines the rest of the way. VT may not be much better, but Miami and UGA should be significantly better than Clemson was up front. Especially UGA.

Oh well. Tough loss. Let’s put that one behind us.

As always, Go Jackets!