Sometimes teams are so good at making the right play at the right time that you forget how difficult football can be.
Clemson has by far the best résumé in college football. But here’s why the Tigers are still hard to predict
The Tigers have a knack for somehow making exactly the play that needs to be made at the time.
Photo by Michael Shroyer/Getty Images
When Clemson’s offense took the field with 4:01 left in the first half against Auburn on September 9, Clemson trailed 6-0. Its offense had done next to nothing, having gained just 40 yards in 19 snaps, punting twice, fumbling once, and missing a long field goal.
It was time to make some plays, so Clemson made some plays.
Clemson drove 88 yards in 3:18, scoring to take a 7-6 lead into halftime, then got the ball to start the second half and drove 79 yards in eight plays to take a 14-6 lead.
The rest of the game, Clemson gained 69 yards in 29 snaps. But its defense would sack Auburn’s Jarrett Stidham seven times in the second half (11 times for the game), and the defending national champions won, 14-6.
Three weeks later in Blacksburg, Va., it was the same phenomenon.
- Clemson converted three of four third-down conversions to start the game, drove for a field goal and a touchdown to take a 10-0 lead, then went three-and-out and five-and-out and missed a 41-yard field goal.
- Virginia Tech got to within 10-3 after a 43-yard field goal, so Clemson flipped the switch: six plays, 75 yards, touchdown, 17-3 halftime lead.
- Tech needed a good start to the second half and got it, forcing a three-and-out and taking the ball over near midfield. Trouble! Clemson’s Dexter Lawrence forced a fumble, and Dorian O’Daniel recovered it. Trouble averted!
- With the score 24-10 early in the fourth quarter, Tech got the ball back with a chance to begin a comeback. Trouble! Tech’s Henri Murphy made a mess of a short pass, and it landed in O’Daniel’s hands. Twenty-two yards later, it was 31-10. Trouble averted!
Clutch play is to sports fans like pornography to Chief Justice Potter Stewart: you know it when you see it. When a single player or team makes the right play at the right time, enough times, we just assume they’re clutch, and that’s the end of the story. Be it coaching, talent, or a combination of the two, when a team makes enough clutch plays in a row, they’re clutch.
Clemson has won 14 of its last 16 one-possession games. It doesn’t get any more clutch than that.
Dabo Swinney’s Tigers have become college football’s David Ortiz, its Kobe Bryant. Yeah, they might struggle through portions of games, and yeah, they might sometimes make certain contests closer than they need to be (hello, Troy 2016), but when the game is on the line, they’re making the plays and you aren’t.
It was Clemson that:
- sacked Stidham three consecutive times to all but end the Auburn game.
- scored 21 fourth-quarter points on Alabama in the 2016 national title game.
- made a red zone interception with a minute left to seal the 2016 ACC title game.
- drove 75 yards with three minutes left to beat Florida State in Tallahassee last October.
- picked off an overtime pass to survive NC State two weeks before the trip to FSU.
- stopped Louisville a yard and a half short on fourth down to win by six last September.
- forced a late turnover on downs against Auburn to start 2016.
- scored on four of five drives once down to North Carolina in the 2015 conference championship.
- foiled a potential game-tying two-point conversion late in the 2015 monsoon game against Notre Dame.
Of course, Ortiz wasn’t actually clutch, Kobe really wasn’t clutch, and Clemson also fell victim to a late Pitt field goal last November, an upset that, under the wrong circumstances — a rash of unbeaten power conference champions, for instance — might have foiled the Tigers’ national title hopes.
When you force yourself to be clutch over and over, you will eventually fail at it, even if Clemson makes it look easy.
S&P+ is not a résumé tool. It is not a “quality wins and quality losses” measure.
By any such résumé measure, Clemson’s 2017 record is staggering at this point. The Tigers, with their three wins over top-15-at-the-time teams, have blown any other team’s quality-wins total out of the water. If the CFP were selected tomorrow (and thank goodness it’s not), the Tigers would be an unassailable No. 1 seed.
That doesn’t make them No. 1 in my S&P+ or pretty much any other computer ratings system designed to look forward, though S&P+ had Clemson No. 1 before the polls did during the Tigers’ 2015 Playoff run.
Such systems are designed to look at the most replicable paths to victory and reward the teams that follow them the closest. They are not inclined to give specific schools the benefit of the doubt. And they suggest the Tigers have some pretty clear improvements to make if they want to repeat as national champs.
The résumé is incredible, but that alone doesn’t make Clemson the best team in the country. Not yet, anyway.
Here’s what S&P+ sees in Clemson:
- A team with minimal big-play capability. The Tigers rank a solid 22nd in offensive success rate, but in IsoPPP (which measures the magnitude of one’s successful plays), they are just 108th. When you aren’t recording a ton of big plays, that means you have to avoid mistakes for eight or 10 plays at a time to score touchdowns. Clemson ranks just 45th in points per scoring opportunity and 41st in passing-downs success rate. Once they fall behind the chains, they are not yet excellent at catching back up.
- A team that gives up nearly as many sacks as it makes. Clemson’s defense ranks second in Adjusted Sack Rate, but the offense ranks 111th. Kelly Bryant is getting sacked 8 percent of the time on standard downs (108th) and 12 percent on passing downs (109th).
- A team with pretty bad special teams. The Tigers rank 120th in Special Teams S&P+, and it’s costing them about a point per game at the moment. They are 119th in punt efficiency, 114th in kick return efficiency, and 106th in field goal efficiency, and they just lost place-kicker Greg Huegel. Special teams can flip a game all by itself, and if it does so in a Clemson game this year, it’s probably flipping it to the opponent. Plus, despite extreme defensive efficiency, special teams has led to Clemson ranking just 68th in field position margin.
Now, aside from Adjusted Sack Rate, the numbers referenced above are unadjusted for opponent. (We’ve almost played enough games to crack into the opponent adjustments full-bore.) But when looking at elite teams, we’re looking for elite stats. Clemson is lacking in a few important categories.
The numbers also see lots of good things. Obviously. The Tigers are fifth in S&P+, after all. But when you see almost scripted performances like what Clemson put together against Virginia Tech, it’s easy to simply assume the team will continue to make the right plays at the right times. That doesn’t have to be the case.
Streaks end.
Beginning in 2012, Florida State won 12 straight one-possession games. Jimbo Fisher has proved to be one of the game’s steadier close-game overachievers (as has Swinney), but after those 12 straight, FSU has lost four of its last six such games.
From 2013 through 2015, Michigan State won nine of 10 one-possession games. In 2016, the Spartans went 0-3.
Even if this is a hot streak doomed to end, though, it doesn’t mean it has to end right away.
And besides that, Clemson has been leaving itself some room for error. The Tigers did, after all, win by two touchdowns in Blacksburg. And in between Auburn and Virginia Tech came a third game against an excellent opponent — Louisville on the road. The Tigers won by 26.
This is an awesome team, one that knows what it takes to survive a 15-game season and one with a coaching staff that knows the right buttons to push. Sooner or later, that button doesn’t do what you want, and that’ll be the case for the Tigers just as it has been for everyone else.
But this team is in the middle of an incredible run. We’ll talk about its ending when it ends.
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