By Will Vandervort.
By Will Vandervort
CLEMSON — After watching how his defense’s confidence was down following the loss to Florida State on Sept. 22, Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney knew he had to do something to give them a shot in the arm.
So what he did was something no one in football does anymore, he went to live tackling the entire practice. Usually, during the course of a season, Swinney will have his players wrap up in what is called a “thud” tackle, which means players are slowed down, but no one goes to the ground. But last week he had his defense start tackling on Tuesday and Wednesday—when Clemson practices in full pads—in hopes it might lift the spirits of his defensive unit.
“I felt like the only way we were going to get better was to simulate the game-speed in practice,” Swinney said following Wednesday’s practice. “The only way to do that is to go live, tackle to the ground and try to fix some of our problems.
“We needed to create some confidence. I felt like we had a confidence problem as far as finishing some plays. So we wanted to create some confidence by having some success in practice.”
Swinney admitted he made a mistake earlier in the season treating the defense as if it was a veteran team and they would get things turned around because of leadership. But without much senior leadership on this year’s group he saw he had to do something because they weren’t getting it done.
“I made a mistake treating them like a veteran group because they are not,” he said. “At some point you have to realize there are some diminishing returns to (live tackling). But, I felt like last week and this week with an open date coming up, you just kind of hold your breath.
“We have been able to get through it okay, and we have definitely improved. I believe it helped us last week.”
It helped Clemson make several plays in the fourth quarter, which ultimately won the game for the Tigers at Boston College. This week, the challenge is a little bit different for the 15th-ranked Tigers as they try to slow down a Georgia Tech running game that is ranked third in the country at 329.4 yards per game.
“We really tackled better last week and we fit everything better,” Swinney said. “Now we still were not perfect, but with everything we are getting ready to see this week with a bunch of guys that really have not seen it, I felt like the only way to get them ready was to go full speed live, with cutting on the perimeter, inside and everything.
“Our guys have done a good job so it has been helpful. If they play like they practice Tuesday and today, then we will have a chance to execute, hopefully, a little bit better on defense.”
Because of the long season and the way the game has changed over the years, no team really does live tackling in practice anymore. Swinney says 99 percent of the programs at the FBS level do not do any live tackling in practice, while no one in the NFL does it.
Swinney doesn’t plan to do this the rest of the season because the risk of serious injury outweighs the reward. But for right now, he said this is what he needed to do so his defensive unit could see what it felt like to make plays.
“We have the open date and then you start getting into that seventh or eighth game, and hopefully by then you have improved, and you can back off a little bit,” Swinney said. “We will probably pick our spots, like maybe this period is live. We have always done a little bit of that, but we have had our entire practice—from the time they hit the field until they left—live and there are not that many teams out there that do that.”