By Will Vandervort.

By Will Vandervort

CLEMSON — Dabo Swinney could not have explained the mechanical issues that have plagued Tajh Boyd off and on the last two weeks any better than he did during his weekly press conference Tuesday.

“Sometimes you can’t explain everything. Sometimes you just screw up,” he said. “Sometimes you just make a bad play. To sit here and try to explain it, it is more just mechanical.”

Boyd’s inconsistency with his mechanics the last two games—first in the first half against Georgia Tech on Oct. 6 and then last Saturday against Virginia Tech—has caused him to misfire from time-to-time. He had several overthrown balls early on against the Yellow Jackets, and in the Tigers’ 38-17 win over Virginia Tech, he threw high to DeAndre Hopkins that led to an interception on the second drive of the game and then again in the back of the end zone on the next possession which led to a 27-yard Chandler Catanzaro field goal.

“If you watch the (interception) it is probably going to be a touchdown,” Swinney said. “But he just doesn’t transfer that weight to his front foot so the ball sails on him. That’s just fundamentals. It’s not anything else.

“Sometimes when you play at such a high level and you do so many things and suddenly you show a weakness or show little human tendencies they say, ‘hey this guy isn’t perfect.’ Then it’s ‘what’s wrong with him? Oh, he is hurt. Oh, it is this.’ There isn’t anything wrong with him. He just did not play a great game.”

Swinney is right. It was not a great game for his starting quarterback. In fact, it was one of his worse outings, at least from a yardage standpoint.

Boyd finished the Virginia Tech game 12 of 23 for 160 yards with a touchdown and an interception. The 160 yards were the second lowest of his career as a starting quarterback, the worse coming at South Carolina last November when he completed just 11 of 29 passes for 83 yards with a touchdown and an interception.

But Swinney pointed out, you can’t just look at the bad plays. Look at how Boyd finished the game and the plays that he made with his arm and his feet.

“My point is,” said Swinney, “how about the one’s he made? He made some great plays too.”

And he did. Boyd threw a 27-yard pass down the near sideline to Sammy Watkins that set up an Andre Ellington touchdown in the third quarter, and then came back on the next possession and found Hopkins deep for a 37-yard touchdown down the same sideline.

The Hampton, Va., native also ran for two scores and his running on the Tigers’ final drive allowed Clemson to kill 5:22 off the clock before he called for the ball himself on a one-yard scoring run for the final points of the afternoon.

“In the end, it is all about, ‘Did you lead your team to victory?’ And that’s what he did and he did it in a gutsy way,” Swinney said. “He did it with his legs and his arms.”

Speaking of his arm, Boyd sat out Sunday’s practice to rest his arm, and more importantly his body, after the physical abuse he took last Saturday. Besides being sacked five times and hit countless others, Boyd carried the ball 15 times in the running game, which made for an achy body.

Boyd, however, isn’t worried about such things. Of course he cares about his health and of course he cares about his performance, but he says the thing that is the most different about himself this year as compared to last year, is the way he has learned not worry about the things he can’t get back or control.

“Sometimes, things just do not go your way,” he said. “But one of the things I learned last year is that you still have to find a way. Regardless of the situation, those guys are depending on me out there. If you dry up and go into your shell, then you are leaving all of your teammates out there by themselves.

“It is all about going out there and continuing to play and play with the best effort possible. One of the things I asked of all the guys earlier this year for was effort. That’s all I really wanted from them. If you give effort, eventually things will come along. But if you back off, or things of that nature, that can lead to a down fall.”