Dabo Swinney and the Tigers’ 66-17 win over Charleston Southern Saturday was a nice recovery win and another performance where the offense could produce yards, but this time, they scored points.
Clemson cleaned up many of their mistakes from their Week 1 loss to Duke. While we still saw a couple of crucial turnovers in the first half, Garrett Riley’s offense came out in the second half and put together a near-perfect half of football. Wins should come when an offense has 200 yards on the ground and through the air, with the Tigers now 59-1 when they do so.
“I am thankful we won this one. I know y’all didn’t like my comment the other day,” Swinney said. “I’ll take 200-plus, 200-plus every game, and I’ll take those odds without the turnovers. Ross (Taylor, Clemson’s Director of Football Communications) did some research on that. I think it was about 1,800 times that’s happened since 2014, and that team’s won 98 percent of the time. So, I’ll take those odds. Now, we found the two percent anomaly. We figured out how to do that.”
The one loss came on Week 1 to the Duke Blue Devils, where the Tigers’ offense made critical mistakes throughout the game even when they could move the ball downfield. Totaling 422 yards of offense in the loss, the Tigers failed to score on three straight red zone drives with a blocked kick and two fumbles inside the 10-yard line.
Swinney knows it isn’t what we want to hear, but he knows they did a lot of good things in that performance.
“It’s a dadgum shame we lost the game, but we freakin’ did some things that you’ve got to do to win football games,” Swinney continued. “Again, the fun’s in the winning, but I’ve been encouraged.”
Whether you agree with that sentiment or not, we definitely saw positives in this matchup against the Buccaneers. In the game they totaled a big 679 yards, including 405 through the air and 274 on the ground. As mentioned, we saw mistakes in the first half, but they really cleaned things up in the second half. It was the type of response you want to see from your team.
“I’m super excited, man. These guys are confident,” the head coach said. “Garrett’s got a good feel for what we’re doing. It’s been a blast. We’re playing good up front. … The turnovers will kill ya, and so if we can get that out of our system, we can be really, really good.
“Because we’ve demonstrated we can really run the football and a game like today… What was Cade, 28-of-37 or something like that? I mean, geez, you talk about gaining some confidence. We caught the ball well. … We threw the ball all over the place and demonstrated some good stuff.”
The Tigers’ next opportunity to impress will be at home against Florida Atlantic.