“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” - Navin R. Johnson
In 2021, Clemson fans - including myself - railed against the seeming lack of offensive imagination. There was a lot of talk about the lack of shifts or motions or really anything that gave an opposing defense something to think about after they lined up along with what really seemed to be a downright refusal to throw anything over the middle of the field. The cause for a lot of this, we reasoned, was poor OL play and very poor QB play combined with a rash of injuries to our RB and WR rooms. So here we are in 2022, with an OL that projects to be much more effective and a QB who should be improved and seems to have put in some serious work in the offseason. And in game one, well, I think its fair to say that there sure still seemed to be very little imagination in this offense.
This offense still lacks even the most rudimentary shift or motion pre snap. Every once in a while the tight end will motion from one side of the field to the other, and even that very little motion forces the defenses to adjust. If you watched Texas vs Alabama or Florida vs Utah, you saw offenses that were shifting and moving guys and being creative in how the move their personnel around and this allowed them to create mismatches and leverage in their formations to generate space. This is especially important if you’re like Texas and facing a team that is overall more talented than you are and generally has better players - or if your Florida and you’ve got a QB who is a fairly average passer at this stage in his career. Defenses have to adjust based on how the offense lines up, and offenses can use this to their advantage by moving guys around and forcing the defense to align the way they want them to. For all his faults, even Rob Spence understood this and probably his greatest strength as a coordinator was his use of multiple, multiple formations and shifts that helped create advantages for the offense.
So then the question becomes, why is the offense lacking? Why are we still running the most vanilla offense we can possibly run? Its the same formations, the same personnel groupings, the same plays, the same routes, the same boring, vanilla formula that‘s been stale for some time now. Its like doing the missionary position every single night. Let’s come up with something a little more creative for a change.
Maybe its because the QB position doesn’t seem to be all that improved. I’d say there’s some marginal improvement, DJ didn’t take as many sacks and did a better job of getting the ball out, though he seemed to throw it away in times when he could have used his feet a bit to give himself more time, which he did on some occasIons. DJ certainly showed off his arm strength on some throws, making throws to the opposite hash look much easier than they really are. But his best throws are to guys who are wide open, he seems to struggle with getting the ball in a good location on throws that will be contested, he doesn’t give his WRs a good chance and still seems really hesitant to put the ball into a tight window. He doesn’t trust himself to make the hard throws.
Let me first say this about the offense line, Jordan McFadden is as polished and as good an offensive lineman as Clemson has had in this century. This guy is really, really good, a clear 1st team all ACC player. He’s a master technician and he’s athletic in space. I strongly doubt he’ll be a major NFL prospect because he’s 6’2. The NFL isn’t going to draft a guy at 6’2 to play left tackle. Maybe right tackle, but more likely he’d go inside and he’ll need to bulk up a bit to do that. I do think he is susceptible to bull rushes and when he comes up on a bigger, stronger defensive end he may have some trouble. But, he’s the best player in the Clemson OL room and its not very close.
I think the interior of this line has a chance to be really good. Will Putnam is much better at center than at guard. At center he can play more to his strengths as a down blocker and isn’t going to be asked to pull or block in space as much. We will come up on defensive fronts where the center is asked to pull. I don’t really like that, I think its a big ask even at an elite level to ask a guy to snap the ball correctly and pull and get to the block on time, but we will ask that of Putnam at some point and I’m interested to see how that works out for us. But, mostly at center he’ll be power zoning with the guards and I think that will prove out to be a really good fit for him.
Walker Parks is a future NFL lineman but probably not at guard. I think he’s much more natural right tackle. He’s similar in size to Penei Sewell. Now, I’m not saying he’s as good as Sewell because Sewell was an elite, #1 pick caliber player, but at 6’5 330 Sewell is absolutely wrecking defensive ends from his right tackle spot for the Lions and I think Parks fits into that mold from a size, attitude, and technical ability standpoint. I think it’d be fantastic if he could move out to left tackle for us in 2023 when McFadden moves on. I just don’t think he’s as natural at guard, but he’s good enough to make it work and is a strong run blocker but still needs to develop some pass pro skills on the inside. Marcus Tate is a giant at left guard and he’s starting to come into his own after getting in over 600 snaps last year. He looks more comfortable out there and is playing faster. He looks like he’s gained a step as well.
So I think the inside of this line can be really good from a run blocking standpoint and they were really good at times - especially in the 2nd half - against Georgia Tech. The major question mark is of course at right tackle. Lots of hype coming out of camp for Blake Miller and its easy to see why. He’s big, athletic, moves really well, doesn’t look like a true freshman to the naked eye, and is pretty polished for a true freshman. There were some ups and downs for him against Tech, which you’d expect in his first game, and overall it probably wasn’t as bad as it seemed.
I will say that the backup OL played pretty well when they were in, but obviously that’s a small sample size. I think this is where philosophies on depth charts come in because I think it would be great if Tristan Leigh could move over to right tackle and push Miller. But at Clemson what we like to do is assign people to a specific position and then build the depth chart on that. So in other words, Blake didn’t beat out everyone for that right tackle spot, he only beat out the guys that were listed as right tackle and once we moved Parks in to guard that didn’t really leave a ton of guys to compete with.
Let’s have a look at some plays. My old gif making tool never really worked all that great and now has just completely bit the dust, so I’m trying something new with youtube clips. If it works great, if not, sorry, I don’t get paid for this shit.
Also, I should probably say I did not watch the Furman game and even if I had the Furman game really tells us nothing about this team.
Ok, let’s get into it.
This is one of the few plays where I saw what looked like a new formation. We stack the tight ends to one side which forces the defense to overload and leaves some space in the middle. The up tight end blocks and the back tight end goes for a route which draws a defender out of the box. I’m assuming there’s an RPO element to this where DJ can pull the ball and dump it to the TE if no one goes out to cover him. Georgia Tech has a middle safety here, which they did most of the day, so they’re playing cover 1/cover 3 to keep a guy down vs the run.
This is a great example of the kind of inside OL play I think these guys can deliver on. Putnam and Tate do a fantastic job on this power zone, they get good movement off the ball and Putnam picks up the linebacker. Likewise McFadden and Allen get good movement, Parks and Miller seal their guys off. But, somehow, Shipley just doesn’t see that hole to his right. He just runs it right into Putnam‘s ass where as if he takes one cut to the right, he‘s got one guy to beat with speed and its a house call.
Another example of really good inside blocking. You can see Parks and Putnam creating a lot of space there on the double team, with Parks finishing the block. Miller also does a nice job of getting up to the second level and walling off that linebacker and creating a nice hole for Pace. Its great to have good blocking from the TE spot again, but you can see GT here still in cover 3 and I can’t really understand why we didn’t try to attack the seams with our TEs. If we could have hit one or two and forced them into a 2 safety coverage it would have opened up a lot more for the run game.
Look at how the defense has to adjust based on this one little motion by the back. That one motion created so much more space or this play, its just a wonder why we don’t utilize this kind of thing more often. Anyway this is an excellently blocked play. Its easy to see how much more athletic Parks is on the pull that Putnam was a year ago, and McFadden just buries his guy to seal off the edge for DJ, who decides to showboat for some reason.
Here’s one of the issues Miller had in pass pro. You can see here he breaks one of the golden rules in offensive line play and he stops his feet. He’s in pretty good position here and then he just…stops. His feet died, so he died. Same thing happens to Parks here, his feet stop moving and his guy keeps going. I think this might be a practice problem. Every day you run a pass pro drill and sometimes you get in a rhythm. You go, you hear whistle, you go, you hear whistle. And it creates a muscle memory of stopping after a few seconds when the whistle normally blows. So if your QB has to hold the ball a little longer than your pass rush drill typically lasts….you stop before you actually should in a game situation. I don’t know that that’s what happened here, I just can’t find another explanation for why both guys stop their feet at about the same time. I can’t tell from the angle if DJ had anyone open down field and missed them, but I can see that he’s got an awful lot of grass to his right.
Here Miller does keep his feet moving. And look at that nice clean pocket and DJ makes a great throw here. They’re still in just a standard ole cover 3 (maybe cloud) and other than the seams, this is a good way to attack it. Get the defender back peddling then cut your route off and QB hits you under the deep zone. This is a really good throw here and I think we should probably appreciate DJ’s arm strength. That ball is on a rope to the opposite sideline and what? 25-30 yards in the air. That’s NFL arm strength.
Parks has trouble here with a twist stunt. Twists are tough to pick up and have given us issues in the past, but Georgia Tech doesn’t have the athletes that, say, Georgia had when they killed us with these kinds of stunts and it should be picked up. I’ve had to try To pick up a twisting defensive end who was way more athletic than me (not that big of an accomplishment, btw) and let Me tell you, it was not fun. But this guy isn’t a better athlete than Parks, this is just poor technique and I think Parks will still have some growing pains in terms of pass pro technique as a guard.
Here Parks does pick up the twist stunt. So Georgia Tech brings it right back just a couple plays later after seeing they beat Parks with it and this time he picks it up really nicely. Miller also does a great job here. And again, there’s a nice lane for DJ to step up into if he wants to buy a little more time before dumping it off, I can’t see what was going on downfield, but DJ had tons of time and room to step up if he wanted to.
Parks again struggles in pass pro. He gets caught flatfooted here and the guy runs by him. Just some technical things he’s got to adjust to inside.
Georgia Tech made an interesting adjustment in the second half. They essentially took dive responsibility away from their defensive end and told him to just go attack the mesh and get the QB. They did this for a handful of plays and then stopped it after we started trapping their guy. I suppose they were just trying to see if they could catch us off guard and make a big play. You can see we aren’t even trying to block that dude because we’re expecting him to crash in on the back.
Here’s the trap we ran against that end. Here we motion the TE from the slot and into a block, which is a nice touch. Another example of how motion can help you. Some more really good interior blocking and Miller getting up to the second level.
Then there’s plays like this. I’m not sure what happened here but it looks like the OL got one play and the skill guys got another because everyone is going in different directions. With their end shooting upfield this play is just kind of a disaster. There were a couple other plays like this where its clear something got crossed up and its really impossible to know who screwed up.
There was another play that protection shifted to the left for an overload blitz but then the blitz came from the right and, of course, disaster. Here’s that play, if you’re curious. I don’t know who’s responsibility that is, if its on the center to make that call or the QB, or if the protection is called by the sideline.
Anyway, my point is, there was a bit of “comedy of errors” thing going on early in the 3rd quarter where a lot of really ugly looking plays happened around the same time period for various reasons and this created the sense that the OL was playing really badly when there were other things going on. That’s not to say OL play was great or perfect, far from it. But this OL shows an awful lot of promise and as they develop and get better, I think you’re going to see a team that’s able to run the ball inside with success fairly regularly. The Louisiana Tech game will give us a little better film than the Furman game will, but we really won’t know for sure how good this offense and OL are until NC State. Wake is going to test our defense, for sure, but I just don’t know if Wake has the athletes along the DL to really test our OL. I’m betting they’ll test them with stunts and twists moreso than with physical matchups.
On defense, look, you guys don’t come here for defensive analysis and I’m not as good a analyzing the defense. But, it was a lot of cover 3 and a lot of quarters coverage, very similar to what BV used to do. I think its probably too early to really know the differences in schemes but we can probably start picking that up as we play familiar opponents. BV used to run a ton of bear against NC State, walk the safety up like he’s an outside linebacker and play cover 3 behind it. So when we get to NC State we might have a good idea if Goodwin likes the same thing. I felt like there was a lot less of the 3 down linemen nickel package than we typically saw out of BV, but its tough to judge out of one game. To say hey there was lots of quarters coverage like BV used isn’t really fair because quarters is maybe the most commonly used coverage in all of football behind tampa 2 coverages.
Bryan Bresee is just at another level, man. This guy was looking like he was going to have a monster year before he got hurt in 2021 and he did not miss a single beat. He is really, really special. Obviously we don’t know what his status will be for the next week or two. This is one of those moments where we could talk alot about why football is important, why having a team and having the structure that football provides can be crucial for young people. I’m reminded of what Antonio Clay went through in 2006 with his sister. So I’m hopeful that he’s got the support to navigate the emotional and mental stress that can come from these moments.
But certainly physically, he is just a special guy. I see him as a JJ Watt type player. Bryan is 6’5 300 and that’s close to what Watt played at through most of his career. Bryan could easily get down to 285 at make a really good living as a 5 technique in a 3-4 defense. I do think our interior DL is a little undersized, it sounds odd to say that with a guy that’s 6’5 and 300lbs, but I think if I was game planning for this defense I’d want to try to drive block these guys and run at them with more physicality and I’d probably stay away from zone runs and more lateral runs because there’s just too much athleticism there. But we don’t have bigger, heavier, stronger guys like Dexter Lawrence or even Carlos Watkins that can take on double teams and keep the LBs clean. But our guys are good at slipping off of blocks, Bresee especially just knows how to disengage and get off the block.
The team that lined up against Georgia Tech last Saturday was not a play off team, I don’t think. But there were some glimpses of a great team in there and I think, you know, we don’t have to be a playoff team right now. I’m not sure that that 2018 team really became a great team until halfway through the season or so. I don’t know that the 2016 team truly became a great team until they got beat by Pitt and got a fire lit under them.
On the QB situation, again I didn’t watch Furman but Klubnik sure looked good in his one drive against Georgia Tech. I think some of the things that jump right out at you are he’s got a live arm, makes quick decisions, and gets the ball out. He‘s not afraid to sling it into a tight window and absolutely trusts his arm. I think we have to be careful about assuming that that means he’s ready to be the starter as a lot more goes into it than just being confident in your arm in garbage time against a team you’re beating by 4 touchdowns. You know, QB is the one position that can make you or break you, you’re giving this guy the ball every single play and asking him to make a lot of decisions that can impact your entire season. So if you make the change, you better be right.
I’m hoping we can get up this week and get Cade some quality snaps against, you know, obviously not a top tier defense but a better defense than what he saw at Furman and maybe get him in some when the game is still a little tight so there’s more intensity on both sides. I think the big adjustment you have to make is how much faster and how much more intense the game is at this level and its hard to experience that when you’re going in after the game is decided or going in against Furman who, let’s be honest, is only a notch or two above the talent levels he probably played against in high school.
Now let’s all take a moment and collectively laugh at Notre Dame and Texas A&M. Nebraska? idk I kinda feel bad for those guys.
GO TIGERS!
In 2021, Clemson fans - including myself - railed against the seeming lack of offensive imagination. There was a lot of talk about the lack of shifts or motions or really anything that gave an opposing defense something to think about after they lined up along with what really seemed to be a downright refusal to throw anything over the middle of the field. The cause for a lot of this, we reasoned, was poor OL play and very poor QB play combined with a rash of injuries to our RB and WR rooms. So here we are in 2022, with an OL that projects to be much more effective and a QB who should be improved and seems to have put in some serious work in the offseason. And in game one, well, I think its fair to say that there sure still seemed to be very little imagination in this offense.
This offense still lacks even the most rudimentary shift or motion pre snap. Every once in a while the tight end will motion from one side of the field to the other, and even that very little motion forces the defenses to adjust. If you watched Texas vs Alabama or Florida vs Utah, you saw offenses that were shifting and moving guys and being creative in how the move their personnel around and this allowed them to create mismatches and leverage in their formations to generate space. This is especially important if you’re like Texas and facing a team that is overall more talented than you are and generally has better players - or if your Florida and you’ve got a QB who is a fairly average passer at this stage in his career. Defenses have to adjust based on how the offense lines up, and offenses can use this to their advantage by moving guys around and forcing the defense to align the way they want them to. For all his faults, even Rob Spence understood this and probably his greatest strength as a coordinator was his use of multiple, multiple formations and shifts that helped create advantages for the offense.
So then the question becomes, why is the offense lacking? Why are we still running the most vanilla offense we can possibly run? Its the same formations, the same personnel groupings, the same plays, the same routes, the same boring, vanilla formula that‘s been stale for some time now. Its like doing the missionary position every single night. Let’s come up with something a little more creative for a change.
Maybe its because the QB position doesn’t seem to be all that improved. I’d say there’s some marginal improvement, DJ didn’t take as many sacks and did a better job of getting the ball out, though he seemed to throw it away in times when he could have used his feet a bit to give himself more time, which he did on some occasIons. DJ certainly showed off his arm strength on some throws, making throws to the opposite hash look much easier than they really are. But his best throws are to guys who are wide open, he seems to struggle with getting the ball in a good location on throws that will be contested, he doesn’t give his WRs a good chance and still seems really hesitant to put the ball into a tight window. He doesn’t trust himself to make the hard throws.
Let me first say this about the offense line, Jordan McFadden is as polished and as good an offensive lineman as Clemson has had in this century. This guy is really, really good, a clear 1st team all ACC player. He’s a master technician and he’s athletic in space. I strongly doubt he’ll be a major NFL prospect because he’s 6’2. The NFL isn’t going to draft a guy at 6’2 to play left tackle. Maybe right tackle, but more likely he’d go inside and he’ll need to bulk up a bit to do that. I do think he is susceptible to bull rushes and when he comes up on a bigger, stronger defensive end he may have some trouble. But, he’s the best player in the Clemson OL room and its not very close.
I think the interior of this line has a chance to be really good. Will Putnam is much better at center than at guard. At center he can play more to his strengths as a down blocker and isn’t going to be asked to pull or block in space as much. We will come up on defensive fronts where the center is asked to pull. I don’t really like that, I think its a big ask even at an elite level to ask a guy to snap the ball correctly and pull and get to the block on time, but we will ask that of Putnam at some point and I’m interested to see how that works out for us. But, mostly at center he’ll be power zoning with the guards and I think that will prove out to be a really good fit for him.
Walker Parks is a future NFL lineman but probably not at guard. I think he’s much more natural right tackle. He’s similar in size to Penei Sewell. Now, I’m not saying he’s as good as Sewell because Sewell was an elite, #1 pick caliber player, but at 6’5 330 Sewell is absolutely wrecking defensive ends from his right tackle spot for the Lions and I think Parks fits into that mold from a size, attitude, and technical ability standpoint. I think it’d be fantastic if he could move out to left tackle for us in 2023 when McFadden moves on. I just don’t think he’s as natural at guard, but he’s good enough to make it work and is a strong run blocker but still needs to develop some pass pro skills on the inside. Marcus Tate is a giant at left guard and he’s starting to come into his own after getting in over 600 snaps last year. He looks more comfortable out there and is playing faster. He looks like he’s gained a step as well.
So I think the inside of this line can be really good from a run blocking standpoint and they were really good at times - especially in the 2nd half - against Georgia Tech. The major question mark is of course at right tackle. Lots of hype coming out of camp for Blake Miller and its easy to see why. He’s big, athletic, moves really well, doesn’t look like a true freshman to the naked eye, and is pretty polished for a true freshman. There were some ups and downs for him against Tech, which you’d expect in his first game, and overall it probably wasn’t as bad as it seemed.
I will say that the backup OL played pretty well when they were in, but obviously that’s a small sample size. I think this is where philosophies on depth charts come in because I think it would be great if Tristan Leigh could move over to right tackle and push Miller. But at Clemson what we like to do is assign people to a specific position and then build the depth chart on that. So in other words, Blake didn’t beat out everyone for that right tackle spot, he only beat out the guys that were listed as right tackle and once we moved Parks in to guard that didn’t really leave a ton of guys to compete with.
Let’s have a look at some plays. My old gif making tool never really worked all that great and now has just completely bit the dust, so I’m trying something new with youtube clips. If it works great, if not, sorry, I don’t get paid for this shit.
Also, I should probably say I did not watch the Furman game and even if I had the Furman game really tells us nothing about this team.
Ok, let’s get into it.
This is one of the few plays where I saw what looked like a new formation. We stack the tight ends to one side which forces the defense to overload and leaves some space in the middle. The up tight end blocks and the back tight end goes for a route which draws a defender out of the box. I’m assuming there’s an RPO element to this where DJ can pull the ball and dump it to the TE if no one goes out to cover him. Georgia Tech has a middle safety here, which they did most of the day, so they’re playing cover 1/cover 3 to keep a guy down vs the run.
This is a great example of the kind of inside OL play I think these guys can deliver on. Putnam and Tate do a fantastic job on this power zone, they get good movement off the ball and Putnam picks up the linebacker. Likewise McFadden and Allen get good movement, Parks and Miller seal their guys off. But, somehow, Shipley just doesn’t see that hole to his right. He just runs it right into Putnam‘s ass where as if he takes one cut to the right, he‘s got one guy to beat with speed and its a house call.
Another example of really good inside blocking. You can see Parks and Putnam creating a lot of space there on the double team, with Parks finishing the block. Miller also does a nice job of getting up to the second level and walling off that linebacker and creating a nice hole for Pace. Its great to have good blocking from the TE spot again, but you can see GT here still in cover 3 and I can’t really understand why we didn’t try to attack the seams with our TEs. If we could have hit one or two and forced them into a 2 safety coverage it would have opened up a lot more for the run game.
Look at how the defense has to adjust based on this one little motion by the back. That one motion created so much more space or this play, its just a wonder why we don’t utilize this kind of thing more often. Anyway this is an excellently blocked play. Its easy to see how much more athletic Parks is on the pull that Putnam was a year ago, and McFadden just buries his guy to seal off the edge for DJ, who decides to showboat for some reason.
Here’s one of the issues Miller had in pass pro. You can see here he breaks one of the golden rules in offensive line play and he stops his feet. He’s in pretty good position here and then he just…stops. His feet died, so he died. Same thing happens to Parks here, his feet stop moving and his guy keeps going. I think this might be a practice problem. Every day you run a pass pro drill and sometimes you get in a rhythm. You go, you hear whistle, you go, you hear whistle. And it creates a muscle memory of stopping after a few seconds when the whistle normally blows. So if your QB has to hold the ball a little longer than your pass rush drill typically lasts….you stop before you actually should in a game situation. I don’t know that that’s what happened here, I just can’t find another explanation for why both guys stop their feet at about the same time. I can’t tell from the angle if DJ had anyone open down field and missed them, but I can see that he’s got an awful lot of grass to his right.
Here Miller does keep his feet moving. And look at that nice clean pocket and DJ makes a great throw here. They’re still in just a standard ole cover 3 (maybe cloud) and other than the seams, this is a good way to attack it. Get the defender back peddling then cut your route off and QB hits you under the deep zone. This is a really good throw here and I think we should probably appreciate DJ’s arm strength. That ball is on a rope to the opposite sideline and what? 25-30 yards in the air. That’s NFL arm strength.
Parks has trouble here with a twist stunt. Twists are tough to pick up and have given us issues in the past, but Georgia Tech doesn’t have the athletes that, say, Georgia had when they killed us with these kinds of stunts and it should be picked up. I’ve had to try To pick up a twisting defensive end who was way more athletic than me (not that big of an accomplishment, btw) and let Me tell you, it was not fun. But this guy isn’t a better athlete than Parks, this is just poor technique and I think Parks will still have some growing pains in terms of pass pro technique as a guard.
Here Parks does pick up the twist stunt. So Georgia Tech brings it right back just a couple plays later after seeing they beat Parks with it and this time he picks it up really nicely. Miller also does a great job here. And again, there’s a nice lane for DJ to step up into if he wants to buy a little more time before dumping it off, I can’t see what was going on downfield, but DJ had tons of time and room to step up if he wanted to.
Parks again struggles in pass pro. He gets caught flatfooted here and the guy runs by him. Just some technical things he’s got to adjust to inside.
Georgia Tech made an interesting adjustment in the second half. They essentially took dive responsibility away from their defensive end and told him to just go attack the mesh and get the QB. They did this for a handful of plays and then stopped it after we started trapping their guy. I suppose they were just trying to see if they could catch us off guard and make a big play. You can see we aren’t even trying to block that dude because we’re expecting him to crash in on the back.
Here’s the trap we ran against that end. Here we motion the TE from the slot and into a block, which is a nice touch. Another example of how motion can help you. Some more really good interior blocking and Miller getting up to the second level.
Then there’s plays like this. I’m not sure what happened here but it looks like the OL got one play and the skill guys got another because everyone is going in different directions. With their end shooting upfield this play is just kind of a disaster. There were a couple other plays like this where its clear something got crossed up and its really impossible to know who screwed up.
There was another play that protection shifted to the left for an overload blitz but then the blitz came from the right and, of course, disaster. Here’s that play, if you’re curious. I don’t know who’s responsibility that is, if its on the center to make that call or the QB, or if the protection is called by the sideline.
Anyway, my point is, there was a bit of “comedy of errors” thing going on early in the 3rd quarter where a lot of really ugly looking plays happened around the same time period for various reasons and this created the sense that the OL was playing really badly when there were other things going on. That’s not to say OL play was great or perfect, far from it. But this OL shows an awful lot of promise and as they develop and get better, I think you’re going to see a team that’s able to run the ball inside with success fairly regularly. The Louisiana Tech game will give us a little better film than the Furman game will, but we really won’t know for sure how good this offense and OL are until NC State. Wake is going to test our defense, for sure, but I just don’t know if Wake has the athletes along the DL to really test our OL. I’m betting they’ll test them with stunts and twists moreso than with physical matchups.
On defense, look, you guys don’t come here for defensive analysis and I’m not as good a analyzing the defense. But, it was a lot of cover 3 and a lot of quarters coverage, very similar to what BV used to do. I think its probably too early to really know the differences in schemes but we can probably start picking that up as we play familiar opponents. BV used to run a ton of bear against NC State, walk the safety up like he’s an outside linebacker and play cover 3 behind it. So when we get to NC State we might have a good idea if Goodwin likes the same thing. I felt like there was a lot less of the 3 down linemen nickel package than we typically saw out of BV, but its tough to judge out of one game. To say hey there was lots of quarters coverage like BV used isn’t really fair because quarters is maybe the most commonly used coverage in all of football behind tampa 2 coverages.
Bryan Bresee is just at another level, man. This guy was looking like he was going to have a monster year before he got hurt in 2021 and he did not miss a single beat. He is really, really special. Obviously we don’t know what his status will be for the next week or two. This is one of those moments where we could talk alot about why football is important, why having a team and having the structure that football provides can be crucial for young people. I’m reminded of what Antonio Clay went through in 2006 with his sister. So I’m hopeful that he’s got the support to navigate the emotional and mental stress that can come from these moments.
But certainly physically, he is just a special guy. I see him as a JJ Watt type player. Bryan is 6’5 300 and that’s close to what Watt played at through most of his career. Bryan could easily get down to 285 at make a really good living as a 5 technique in a 3-4 defense. I do think our interior DL is a little undersized, it sounds odd to say that with a guy that’s 6’5 and 300lbs, but I think if I was game planning for this defense I’d want to try to drive block these guys and run at them with more physicality and I’d probably stay away from zone runs and more lateral runs because there’s just too much athleticism there. But we don’t have bigger, heavier, stronger guys like Dexter Lawrence or even Carlos Watkins that can take on double teams and keep the LBs clean. But our guys are good at slipping off of blocks, Bresee especially just knows how to disengage and get off the block.
The team that lined up against Georgia Tech last Saturday was not a play off team, I don’t think. But there were some glimpses of a great team in there and I think, you know, we don’t have to be a playoff team right now. I’m not sure that that 2018 team really became a great team until halfway through the season or so. I don’t know that the 2016 team truly became a great team until they got beat by Pitt and got a fire lit under them.
On the QB situation, again I didn’t watch Furman but Klubnik sure looked good in his one drive against Georgia Tech. I think some of the things that jump right out at you are he’s got a live arm, makes quick decisions, and gets the ball out. He‘s not afraid to sling it into a tight window and absolutely trusts his arm. I think we have to be careful about assuming that that means he’s ready to be the starter as a lot more goes into it than just being confident in your arm in garbage time against a team you’re beating by 4 touchdowns. You know, QB is the one position that can make you or break you, you’re giving this guy the ball every single play and asking him to make a lot of decisions that can impact your entire season. So if you make the change, you better be right.
I’m hoping we can get up this week and get Cade some quality snaps against, you know, obviously not a top tier defense but a better defense than what he saw at Furman and maybe get him in some when the game is still a little tight so there’s more intensity on both sides. I think the big adjustment you have to make is how much faster and how much more intense the game is at this level and its hard to experience that when you’re going in after the game is decided or going in against Furman who, let’s be honest, is only a notch or two above the talent levels he probably played against in high school.
Now let’s all take a moment and collectively laugh at Notre Dame and Texas A&M. Nebraska? idk I kinda feel bad for those guys.
GO TIGERS!
