The 14th-ranked Clemson Tigers will have their hands full Saturday when they take on the top-ranked Georgia Bulldogs in the Aflac Kickoff Game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.
Kickoff will be at noon ET on ABC. ESPN’s Greg McElroy, who will also be calling the game alongside Sean McDonough, weighed in with his thoughts on the Tigers’ unenviable task of facing a Georgia team that hasn’t lost a regular season game since 2020 and who many expect to win the national championship this season.
McElroy began by asking an obvious question that’s been on the minds of many: are the two programs headed in different directions?
“There’s some perception that they might be just based on how things have looked the past couple of years for Clemson and Georgia,” McElroy said. “People think one’s on the way up or at the top of the sport. (The) other, people seem to think that it’s going in the wrong direction. I don’t know if I agree with that, but over the last three years, Georgia has as many losses as they do national championships.
“Clemson, by comparison, has lost three games in each of the past three seasons.”
As McElroy noted, Clemson finished 9-4 last season, marking the first time since 2010 that the Tigers failed to hit 10 wins.
Clemson and Georgia have combined to win four of the last eight national championships dating back to 2018. But underscoring how much the gap has widened between the two programs in recent years is the fact that the Tigers are 13.5-point underdogs entering the game.
“The reason why people think it’s not going so well for Clemson is because they have been slow to adopt the modern era of the sport,” McElroy said before mentioning that the Tigers hadn’t brought in a single player from the transfer portal each of the past two years. “They have zero percent total starts from Clemson players that have come from the transfer portal. That’s obviously the lowest.
“But Georgia doesn’t have that much of a different philosophy from Clemson. Just 12 percent of their starts (came) from the portal, which is 119th in the FBS. Both really lean into high school recruiting, but Clemson has not added the few pieces that Georgia has the last couple years to really fortify their roster and maybe cover up some weak points.”
McElroy said that Clemson’s lack of usage of the portal didn’t mean the Tigers hadn’t necessarily tried. “They just haven’t landed some of those players,” he noted.
McElroy listed four questions that he thinks will determine the outcome of Saturday’s game.
“Number one: can Clemson’s heavy pressure affect Carson Beck?” McElroy asked. “Clemson blitzed on nearly half of their opponents’ dropbacks last year. That was the second highest rate in the sport. They also heated up quarterbacks on a pretty heavy basis. They recorded pressures on nearly 40 percent of the dropbacks, which is among the Top 10-15 in the sport. So, they can get after the quarterback.
“Here’s the thing: nobody gets the ball out faster than Carson Beck in (college football). He releases it in under 2.4 seconds. He’s one of three quarterbacks that did that last year. So Beck sees it, he identifies it, and he takes advantage of it. When you blitz him, it wears you out because his numbers actually improve against the blitz.”
McElroy said that blitzing Beck wouldn’t necessarily get the Tigers a victory but that making him move around in the pocket might.
“Force him to shuffle his feet. Make him feel uncomfortable,” McElroy said. “It’s a little bit like Tom Brady. When his feet are set, he’s going to tear you apart, but when he moves, his QBR drops by 65 points. (Beck’s) completion percentage drops from 77 to 49.2 percent when you make him move. Can you pressure Carson Beck? If Clemson can, they have a chance of slowing down this offense.”
Another question McElroy had was whether Georgia could consistently beat Clemson’s man coverage in the secondary.
“When you look at Georgia, you didn’t see a lot of man (coverage) last year,” McElroy said. “Most of what you saw against Georgia was zone coverage, partly because they had such talented wideouts… Beck was extremely efficient against zone coverage, but against man, there really isn’t enough of a sample size to really acknowledge it.
“They have great weapons, we know that: Dominic Lovett, the addition of Benjamin Yurosek from Stanford, Lawson Luckie is also healthy. so they have some guys that can beat you up in man, but can they do it consistently enough? Because that’s what they’re going to get from Clemson. Nobody plays more man coverage than Clemson except for Purdue and Notre Dame.”
McElroy posed two other questions: could the Tigers run the ball against the Bulldogs’ front seven, and could they create big plays in the passing game with quarterback Cade Klubnik in his second season in Garrett Riley’s offense?
McElroy noted that returning tailback Phil Mafah became the featured running back down the stretch of 2023. He added that Georgia’s run defense also took a step back a year ago.
“From ’19 to ’22, they allowed 76 rushing yards a game,” McElroy said of the Bulldogs’ run defense. “Last year, they allowed 113.6 per game. In a four-year span, that’s about a 40 yard gap. Another key area is they allowed one full yard more per rush before contact, and they gave up an awful lot of yardage outside the tackles… over 5 yards per carry outside the tackles, and they gave up over 5 yards a carry on zone reads. So, can Clemson run the football?”
As for whether Clemson could create big plays under Klubnik, McElroy pointed to the absence of big-play receivers on the Tigers’ roster a year ago. One of the biggest offseason additions for Clemson is four-star receiver Bryant Wesco out of Midlothian, Texas.
Wesco is a highly routed recruit who recently made ESPN’s list of the top 100 newcomers in college football this season. He was ranked by 247Sports as the nation’s 11th best receiver in the class of 2024.
“Last year, they just didn’t manufacture a whole lot,” McElroy said. “Just 46 plays that gained 20+ yards. That was 98th in the sport. Just 9.9 percent of their completions went for 20+ yards. That was 131st in the sport. Now, Klubnik didn’t really push the ball downfield, but they also didn’t really have a deep arsenal of weapons at wide receiver because guys were beat up all throughout last year.
“We know Georgia’s going to rush the quarterback. It’s going to be hard to create plays on a regular basis. But when there are chances down the field to make plays, you’ve got to make them if you’re going to beat the Georgia Bulldogs.”
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