Zoned out
Tigers have to put scoring woes, Durham debacle behind them
The cruelty of football is in its timing.
You suffer through the longest offseason in sports, aching for that glorious return to action. You wish away perfectly lovely summer evenings thinking about your team in nothing but positives, because as time gets further and further away from the last time you saw them on the field, you forget what happens when things go wrong.
And on Monday night, boy how they went wrong for the Clemson Tigers.
It’s frankly impossible to devise a more infuriating way to lose a football game, even down to the fact it was the first game. While new offensive coordinator Garrett Riley’s playcalling looked much improved in the second half, all of the elements of the offense that were a problem at the end of last season were present — a quarterback who never looked settled in the pocket, a receiving corps that observed the buddy system with opposing DBs and a widespread case of fumbleitis.
In his two starts as a college quarterback, Cade Klubnik has led the Clemson offense into opposition territory on 19 of 27 drives. The results of those 19 drives? Four scoring drives (two touchdowns and two field goals), five missed field goals, one failed fake field goal as part of five turnover on downs, four turnovers, two times where the half ended and a punt.
The series of drives to start the second half on Monday will have been the hardest to rewatch in the film room. On the first three drives of the half coming after Duke took the lead 14–6, Clemson were inside the 10-yardline all three times, and twice reached the 1. Those drives ended blocked field goal, fumble on a quarterback-running back exchange and goal-line fumble.
If the Tigers were to get into the end zone on one of those drives, you feel like Dabo Swinney’s team ultimately would’ve found a way to win and had the next two weeks to iron out the wrinkles before the arrival of prime challenger, Florida State. Instead, the defense which had shown its own issues but had rebounded up until the last fumble crumbled, and the result deteriorated into an eye-popping 28–7 defeat. Now, there is a massive spotlight on the program with all the speculation over how quickly and how steeply the fall will be.
Now a new kind of waiting has set in — dread. If the summer felt long, then the wait between games will be interminable. And now the visit of the Seminoles who looked so dominant in dismantling №5 LSU on Sunday night looms in all the worst ways. For the first time, Clemson will not just be an underdog stepping into its own stadium, but a decided one. The chief concern might not be the implications on the College Football Playoff or even the ACC Championship; it might be on not embarrassing themselves.
In the meantime, the Tigers must find a way to regain both form and confidence against Charleston Southern and Florida Atlantic. The phrase “seeing one go in” is more attributed to basketball, soccer and golf, but Klubnik and the offense could certainly benefit from seeing a few scoring opportunities end with cannons going off and the Tiger Band playing.
Decisive wins against lesser opponents won’t be enough to put any fear into the surging Seminoles. Nor will it be enough to completely erase the sting of Monday night.
But the only way out is through.
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The day that took a great Clemson man from us needed a football game to match.
Robert E. (Bobby) McCormick passed away on Monday, and there is nobody who embodied what makes a university and its small, lake-locked town in the northwest corner of South Carolina so special like Bobby.
He owned two degrees from Clemson (classes of 1972 and 1974) and then went onto be a mainstay of the business college first as an economics professor all the way up to being the school’s dean from 2014 to 2018. In 2022, he was given the highest honor the Clemson University Board of Trustees has to offer: the Clemson Medallion.
But to me, he was Bobby. He was a great friend to my dad — so much so that he was one of the reasons I was named Robert but given a different nickname because there could only be one Bobby — just like he was a great friend to so many people. Though he treated my family as his own, I know his wife and two sons will be hurting the most right now, and we send you all our love and support during this awful time.
If you are lucky enough to go to college football games with any regularity, I’m sure you have people who have such a large role on those long-awaited days that the space they occupy in your heart becomes so much greater than the frequency of which you see them would suggest. Although Bobby was always a huge part of my life, I will always remember him in association to those wonderful Saturdays in the fall that we got to spend time with him at his house in Clemson.
It’s unfathomable to me that the next time I’m in town, he won’t be there.
Thank you for everything, Bobby. We’ll all miss you so much. And, if you’ll pardon a columnist’s use of a phrase you don’t see often in a sports section, but one he was so fond of signing off all of his conversations with, “Go Tigers!”
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Robbie Tinsley is an award-winning columnist from his time as the sports editor of The Journal in Seneca, S.C. He now works on a freelance basis from his home in Massachusetts. He can be reached either via Twitter @RTinMan13 or email at robtinsley13@gmail.com.
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This column also appeared in the Saturday, Sept. 9th edition of The (Seneca) Journal.
