D.J. Uiagalelei’s struggles have been well-documented this season. There also wasn’t much to the way Clemson’s quarterback played last season to indicate this was coming.
Granted, the 2020 season was a much smaller sample size for Uiagalelei, who played just 235 snaps as a true freshman but also got his first two career starts once Trevor Lawrence tested positive for COVID-19. Those performances for a top-5 team at the time lent themselves to preseason Heisman Trophy chatter for Uiagalelei, who threw for 781 yards and accounted for five total touchdowns against Boston College and Notre Dame and finished the season with a 67% completion percentage.
“That’s D.J. to me,” Clemson offensive coordinator Tony Elliott said.
His pass efficiency rating of 146.4 was the fifth-highest for an ACC freshman signal caller since 2002, but this season hasn’t come anywhere close to resembling that one for Uiagalelei, whose completion rate has dropped below 55%. And he’s thrown nearly as many interceptions (7) as touchdowns (8) heading into Clemson’s ACC finale against No. 13 Wake Forest on Saturday.
Elliott understands those pondering why the difference has been so drastic, but Clemson’s offensive coordinator said he doesn’t think it’s fair to compare the two given the difference in the dynamics at play.
Specifically, Elliott alluded to the revolving door of personnel Clemson’s offense has dealt with this season because of injuries, COVID-19 protocols or in-season departures, making continuity hard to come by for the unit. The Tigers have had six different starting combinations along the offensive line while three of Clemson’s primary receivers — Justyn Ross (foot), Joseph Ngata (foot) and Frank Ladson (groin) — have all missed some if not most of the season. Meanwhile, freshman running back Phil Mafah got his first career start last week against Connecticut, the fourth different starter the Tigers have had in the backfield.
“Everything is constantly changing,” Elliott said. “If want to compare him to a standard, you look at Trev and Deshaun (Watson), they, for the most part, had their pieces in place that they could feed on that could help them in a situation to make things right where (Uiagalelei’s) pieces have constantly been changing. They’re constantly moving around, and he’s got to be able to persevere through that.”
Uiagalelei seemed to take a step forward the previous two weeks when he combined to complete 61% of his passes for 409 yards and three scores and just one pick in leading fourth-quarter comebacks against Florida State and Louisville. Yet despite going against a UConn defense that ranks in the triple digits nationally in nearly every major statistical category, he took a step back.
Playing with a bulky brace on his sprained right knee, Uiagalelei played the better part of three quarters in Clemson’s lopsided win, completing just 21 of his season-high 44 attempts. The first half was particularly laboring for him. Uiagalelei was just 17 of 37 through the first two quarters and misfired on eight straight throws at one point. He accounted for one of Clemson’s two turnovers with a second-quarter interception.
Elliott said he hadn’t heard Uiagalelei complain about his knee pain affecting his accuracy, though Elliott still hadn’t had any lengthy conversations with him since the game as of Monday afternoon. Drops by a largely new combination of receivers were part of the problem, but some of the overthrows on intermediate routes that plagued Uiagalelei so often in the first half of the season resurfaced, too. One in particular likely cost the Tigers a touchdown when he sailed a pass high of a wide-open Dacari Collins near the goal line in the first half.
What caused those particular misfires to rear their collective ugly head? Elliott pointed to the pressure UConn was creating with the interior of its defensive line as part of the reason, but not all of it.
“When you go back and watch it, he wasn’t able to follow through (on his throws),” Elliott said. “We’re still working on him to keep his feet pointed as his target and making sure he’s not throwing off balance and trying to make sure he’s not throwing across his body. Again, you’re talking about a young man that’s ultra talented that’s been able to do those things, but as he goes forward, there are just going to be a couple of things that we’re trying to help him clean up because the margin for error in the passing game, the higher you go up, the smaller that margin for error is.”
Some of the releases on those throws weren’t clean either, resulting in the ball fluttering out of Uiagalelei’s hand at times and failing to hit their intended target.
“I think some of it is throwing across the body a little bit. And I think in the game, some of it was not being able to step up and follow through,” Elliott said. “When you finish, you’ve got to finish coming down with your index finger being the last thing that touches the ball. When you can’t follow through, you might not be able to complete your throwing motion to put the tight spiral on the ball.
“He throws it hard. It comes out hard. There’s been instances in practice where it gets to where it needs to be, but it may not have the tight spiral on it. I think you look at some of the quarterbacks in the NFL, it isn’t always a pretty tight spiral but it gets to where it needs to be.”
Clemson needs Uiagalelei and the rest of the offense to be better as the Tigers prepare to try to go blow for blow with a Wake Forest team scoring the second-most points in the Football Bowl Subdivision (44.7 per game). Whether that happens this week or not remains to be seen, but Elliott believes his young quarterback will be better off at some point for going through a season that’s fallen well short of expectations.
“I know what he’s going through now is going to result in what we saw and beyond in the first two games last year,” Elliott said. “Because of all the adversity that he’s gone through.”
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