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Friedlander: After sleepwalking through an opening loss to Georgia, Clemson’s offense is wide awake now
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Losing your first game by 31 points isn’t the optimal way to start a season.
Even if it was to the No. 1 team in the country.
But for Clemson, that 34-3 opening week beatdown from Georgia could be the best thing to happen to the Tigers.
It wasn’t so much a wakeup call for the players as it was a warning to Dabo Swinney and offensive coordinator Garrett Riley. One that forced them to become much more aggressive in their game plan than they showed against the Bulldogs.
If their offense really is as improved as they spent the entire offseason claiming, they needed to stop trying to dink and dunk their way down the field and let quarterback Cade Klubnik and Co. start putting pressure on defenses.
Instead of the other way around.
Consider the message delivered and understood.
In its 2 games since Georgia, Clemson has scored 125 points and totaled 1,235 yards of total offense while dispatching Appalachian State and NC State in lopsided fashion. And it hasn’t messed around in doing so.
In both games, the 21st-ranked Tigers scored touchdowns within the first 4 plays of the game and kept the hammer down. They followed a school-record 35-point 1st quarter outburst against the Mountaineers by hitting the Wolfpack with 28 early points on the way to a 59-35 beatdown in their ACC opener Saturday.
It was the 800th win in program history, making Clemson the first conference school to reach that milestone.
It was also more decisive than even the final 24-point margin indicated. There’s no telling how many points the Tigers might have put up had Swinney not taken out Klubnik, running back Phil Mafah and his other starters early in the 3rd quarter and played out the string with his backups and walk-ons.
Klubnik’s stats weren’t as gaudy as they were against App State, when he threw for 378 yards and 5 touchdowns. But they were still impressive. He finished 16-of-24 for 209 yards and 3 scores passing with another 70 yards and a touchdown on 4 carries rushing. He started the rampage with a 55-yard TD run.
Some of that success can be chalked up to the opposition. The Mountaineers are a Group of 5 program while the Wolfpack, despite boasting one of the ACC’s best defenses over the past few seasons, just got torched for 51 against Tennessee 2 weeks ago.
More important than the raw numbers, however, is the method with which the Tigers amassed them. Their approach was a direct contrast to the sputtering effort that produced just 188 total yards against UGA.
Of the 29 passes Klubnik attempted that afternoon at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, 13 were thrown either behind the line or within 10 yards of the line of scrimmage. Yielding 11 yards. There were only 7 passes that traveled more than 15 yards in the air, 5 of which were incomplete.
The junior quarterback, who hasn’t exactly lived up to his hype as the top-ranked passer prospect in his class, was widely criticized for his performance against the Bulldogs. But Swinney and Riley were vocal in their defense of their offensive leader.
Their support for Klubnik wasn’t just verbal.
They also gave him an aggressive new game plan much more conducive for success. They sped up the tempo and cut him loose, allowing him to throw the ball downfield and giving him more opportunities to take advantage of the talented playmakers surrounding him.
Klubnik had 6 completions of 20 or more yards, including 4 of at least 30 yards, against App State. He connected at least 3 times each with 5 different receivers.
It was more of the same Saturday against State. This time he had 5 explosive passing plays of 25 or more yards, 1 each to Antonio Williams, TJ Moore, Tony Stellato and Adam Randall.
“I loved the game plan Coach Riley put in for this one,” Klubnik said after the game. “I love playing with a lot of tempo, keeping the defenses on their heels whenever I can.”
It’s a revised strategy has completely transformed the narrative surrounding the Tigers and catapulted them right back into the conversation as an ACC frontrunner.
Don’t let the scores of the past 2 games fool you. Most of the points App State and NC State scored came after Clemson’s starting defense retired to the sideline.
With a schedule whose toughest remaining game – at Florida State on Oct. 5 – no longer seems quite as challenging, this version of the Tigers appears is on a collision course to meet No. 10 Miami in Charlotte on Dec. 7 with a conference championship and a spot in the College Football Playoff on the line.
It’s a scenario that didn’t seem likely just 4 weeks ago, thanks to Georgia. But thanks to a little help from those Dawgs, it does now.
Award-winning columnist Brett Friedlander has covered the ACC and college basketball since the 1980s.
