Putting things on hold wasn’t exactly a new experience for Clemson coach Dabo Swinney and his team, though it had been a while.
Early in Swinney’s tenure, the Tigers withstood a couple of weather delays in a rain-soaked 25-7 win at Boston College during the 2009 season. But what happened Saturday in and around Memorial Stadium was a first for the Tigers under Swinney’s guidance.
“It was a really crazy day,” Swinney said. “But man what an unbelievable effort by our guys.”
No. 6 Clemson won this one, too — a 14-8 nail biter over Georgia Tech — but it took more than five hours for the Tigers to officially start their first winning streak of the season. The game kicked off at 3:30 p.m. local time before a lighting strike within eight miles of the stadium around 5 p.m. halted play. Originally it was going to be a 30-minute pause, but after a couple of extensions, the game didn’t resume for another 1 hour, 52 minutes.
Making the delay even stranger was the fact that it came with more than 20 seconds still left in the second quarter with Clemson clinging to a 7-0 lead. The teams agreed to let the delay count as halftime, meaning they would finish the half once play resumed and immediately start the third quarter afterward.
Once the game finally started back up around 7 p.m., Tech kicked a field goal and then got another possession right after that since the Yellow Jackets won the coin toss and deferred to the second half.
“It was definitely tough,” quarterback D.J. Uiagalelei said, referencing the difficulty in finding an offensive rhythm while waiting things out.
Yet it was far from the only adverse situation for the Tigers.
Clemson began the game without one of its starting linebackers, senior Baylon Spector, whom Swinney said had some inflammation in his knee that flared up late in the week. Spector went through pregame warmups but ultimately decided he couldn’t go, forcing backup LaVonta Bentley and reserve Keith Maguire into a rotation on the weak side.
The Tigers lost another linebacker midway through the second quarter when Trenton Simpson was called for targeting after making contact with Tech quarterback Jordan Yates in the upper chest and neck area at the tail end of a play. Simpson won’t have to miss any of next week’s game at North Carolina State since his ejection for the penalty came in the first half, but the Tigers didn’t have him the rest of the way either.
“That’s the only positive there,” Swinney said. “It was a bang-bang play. I didn’t get to see it like the replay people see it.”
And whether it was having trouble getting warmed back up or larger issues for an offense that’s still struggling to produce the explosiveness the Tigers have been accustomed to in recent years, Clemson didn’t get much help from that side of the ball. The Tigers finished with their second-lowest outputs of the season in terms of yards (284) and points, and Clemson averaged just 4.3 yards per play — the same amount as Tech.
Swinney, Uiagalelei and Elliott credited Tech’s defensive scheme for much of Clemson’s offensive frustration. The Yellow Jackets, they explained, often dropped eight defenders and played almost exclusively “cloud” coverage on the back end in order to limit Clemson’s passing game from hitting big plays over the top, something Elliott said the Yellow Jackets didn’t show against the Tigers last season.
“They absolutely lined up (defensively) in nothing that we prepared for,” Swinney said.
Uiagalelei misfired on a few middle-to-deep throws, something Elliott said he has to keep working with the sophomore quarterback on fundamentally. But Uiagalelei finished 18 of 25 through the air, though his 7 yards per completion showed just how committed Tech was to keeping everything in front.
With the Yellow Jackets backing off, Clemson opted to lean on the running game more in the second half with Uiagelelei getting involved, too. Freshman running back Will Shipley (21 for 88 yards and two TDs) and Uiagalelei (eight for 46), whose number was called often in the power run game, combined for 29 of the Tigers’ 41 carries. While Clemson averaged just 3.9 yards per tote as a team, each of them was at 4.2 yards or better.
“We’re going to do whatever we have to do to win the game,” Swinney said of using his quarterback more as a runner Saturday.
Clemson had 94 of its rushing yards in the second half when the Tigers only had three possessions. They milked plenty of clock with two of them covering at least 66 yards, but Clemson came away empty-handed on one when Uiagalelei fumbled in the red zone early in the fourth quarter. Clemson also ended its longest drive of the first half without any points midway through the second quarter after a shovel pass to Shipley on fourth-and-2 went for no gain at Tech’s 19-yard line.
“I thought the guys did a good job of handling situations and finding a way when the game was on the line to come up with the drives to put us in position,” Elliott said. “We’ve just got to finish. If we finish two of those drives there with points, it’s a little different feeling coming out of the game.”
Even running out the rest of the clock following the defense’s goal-line stand in the waning seconds proved to be a tough task, though Clemson seemed to make things even tougher on itself by staying in the shotgun. Shipley got the handoff in his own end zone. He got out before fumbling backward, resulting in a safety with 7 ticks left.
“That’s what we’ve always done,” Swinney said of staying in the shotgun in that scenario. “Definitely thought about going under (center), but we’ve got a young quarterback. We just went with what we’re comfortable with. And we had a good play. We just dropped the ball.”
It all left the Tigers feeling fortunate to survive a game that featured a little bit of everything.
“We’re getting better, but we’re still a work in progress,” Swinney said. “Tonight was an incredibly strange game.”