Clemson hadn’t played perfect for much of the season. Now the Tigers are no longer striving for perfection.
Notre Dame sent Clemson crashing from the ranks of the unbeaten Saturday with a 35-14 win that the Irish led by four touchdowns before the Tigers scored their first point. Clemson tumbled eight spots to No. 12 in the latest polls and figure to also be outside the top 10 of the latest College Football Playoff rankings when those are released Tuesday, making a second straight playoff miss a likely outcome for the Tigers barring chaos breaking out across the sport over the next month.
The most pressing question is, with both of the sides of the ball suddenly struggling to find consistency, will Clemson still only have one loss when it heads to Charlotte the first Saturday in December for the ACC championship?
The Tigers have already clinched their spot in the conference title game thanks to Pittsburgh’s win over Syracuse over the weekend, but Clemson will put its unblemished ACC record on the line two more times this month. And when Louisville visits Memorial Stadium on Saturday, Clemson will be trying to rebound from its worst loss since a 49-28 national semifinal setback to Ohio State at the end of the 2020 season.
“We’ve got to respond,” Clemson coach Dabo Swinney said. “I know we’ve got good people. We’ve got good players and good coaches and a lot of people who really care. We’ve got to recommit to the standard, learn from it and own it. We’ve got to fix it. It’s a lot of little things that we have to do better, and it’s our job to make sure we do that.”
But what makes Swinney confident his team can do that after such a lopsided loss, one in which the Tigers were physically dominated at the point of attack? Not only did Clemson have its worst offensive performance of the season (281 total yards), but the defense, which had started to show some vulnerabilities against the run in prior games, was gashed on the ground by the Irish for 263 yards, the most Clemson has allowed since a Lamar Jackson-led Louisville rushed for 273 against the Tigers in 2016.
While the rush-defense average jumped a whopping 20 yards after Notre Dame got through with the Tigers, Clemson still owns the nation’s 14th-ranked run defense. And the offense put up 51 points and 377 passing yards at Wake Forest while rushing for more than 250 yards against Syracuse two games ago, an indication of the group’s potential.
“Just based on what I’ve seen,” Swinney said of the totality of the season. “We’ve obviously played better this year. We shut out Syracuse in the second half. That was a physical team. Did what we needed to go. We’ve done it on several occasions.”
Swinney is also using perspective with his team. As bad as Saturday was, it was one loss that had no impact on the ACC race. There are plenty of issues for Swinney and his players to try to solve this week, but with two more conference games and that rivalry game with South Carolina still on the regular-season slate, Swinney was adamant that motivation won’t be among them.
“We’ve got a group of guys that will show up and compete. They really care,” Swinney said. “They were really hurting (Sunday) night, but they’ll show up with a mindset (Monday) to get back to work. And that’s exactly what we’ll do.
“There are only four undefeated teams in the country. It is what it is. Nobody wants to lose, but the reality is we’ve got a lot of opportunity in front of us. And that’s the good thing.”
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