By Will Vandervort.
By Will Vandervort
CLEMSON — A good football season is not determined by how many wins a team can rack up, though it helps. But a football season is a process. For a football coach like Dabo Swinney, he hopes the 2012 season will be defined by not only the number of wins his ninth-ranked Tigers record, but if they showed improvement during the journey.
“I’m confident in the guys that we have,” Swinney said Tuesday during his weekly press conference. “They are committed. Now we just have to go do it one week at a time. We can’t do it all in one week. You have to take it one game at a time and keep improving.
“I see our team getting better. I see guys improving gradually and that’s a good trend.”
That trend has really showed the last couple of weeks, especially on the defensive side of the football. After giving up 49, 31 and 31 points in consecutive games to Florida State, Boston College and Georgia Tech, Clemson has rallied to hold its last two opponents—Virginia Tech and Wake Forest—to a combined 30 points.
“I think it says a lot about the growth of our defense at a lot of different levels,” defensive coordinator Brent Venables said. “It starts with us as coaches in understanding what our guys can and can’t do and then getting them to do what we want them to do. Then it goes to guys growing up within the system and being players, football players and doing their job.
“They have been playing with better technique and fundamentals. They are aggressive because they are assured with what they are doing and are playing with a lot of confidence.”
The Tigers (7-1, 4-1 ACC) are also stopping the run. Against Virginia Tech on Oct. 20, Clemson held Hokie running backs to 93 yards on 28 carries, 3.3 yards per carry. In the Tigers’ 42-13 win over Wake Forest last Thursday, the Demon Deacons rushed for only 51 yards as a team.
“I feel like we have improved because everyone is a little more experienced,” linebacker Tig Willard said. “Now that we have that game experience under our young defensive line’s belt, they are pulling together for us.
“That was the main thing. We just had a lot of guys that did not have game experience and now they understand what they have to do and they are coming through for us.”
The same thing is happening on the offense, where the Tigers are on pace to shatter just about every record on the books for a single season. But the biggest improvement offensively is how they have handled adversity.
“We have done a good job not getting too high and not getting too low based off all the other factors,” quarterback Tajh Boyd said. “That’s a sign of what type of team we are becoming and the sign for the future of this program.”
No better example than in the Virginia Tech game. The Hokies were bringing pressure and were confusing the Clemson offense for a better part of the afternoon, but with Boyd’s leadership, the offense stayed the course. They did not get frustrated despite five sacks and a season-high six three-and-outs, and eventually got a 27-yard pass to Sammy Watkins to set up an Andre Ellington touchdown, and then a 37-yard touchdown pass to DeAndre Hopkins.
“It’s a focus factor and getting in tune,” Boyd said. “In certain situations you have to remember why you play the game. You play it for those guys beside you. You play it to represent this university in the best way possible and we are getting to a point to now we are playing to a standard, regardless of who we are playing.
“It does not matter if we are playing a high school team. Regardless of the situation, we want to play to our standard and let everything else take care of itself.”
The Tigers will try to play to that standard Saturday night when they travel to Duke at 7 p.m. on ESPN 2.