By Will Vandervort.
Dabo Swinney says he still has night sweats when he thinks about Todd Gurley. He says he can still see the Georgia running back breaking off right tackle and sprinting 75 yards up the sideline for a touchdown in last year’s game in Death Valley.
Clemson had no answer for 12th-ranked Georgia’s running game and especially Gurley, despite its 38-35 victory a season ago. Gurley, who the Tigers recruited heavily, rushed for 154 yards and scored two touchdowns on only 12 carries that night.
“You have to have your defense swarming to the ball,” Clemson defensive tackle DeShawn Williams said. “Gurley makes a lot of guys miss. You have to have your brothers right behind you because he is a big strong guy. You saw that on that second series when he took it like almost 80 something yards.
“I knew he was fast, but I did not know he was that fast.”
The 16th-ranked Tigers cannot afford to let Gurley or Keith Marshall have that kind of night again if they expect to leave Athens, Ga., on Saturday with a victory. Last year, the two combined to rush for 197 of the Bulldogs’ 222 yards.
“It was very physical. It’s SEC ball,” Williams said. “They will try to pound you into submission. I think last year we took on that challenge and I felt like we were stronger and the weight room paid off because we worked so hard in the off-season, but it was a battle. Every play was a battle. Even the passing plays were a battle because they blocked like it was a run. It was a battle.”
And tackling Gurley is like running into a tree.
“He is a big boy. He is a real big boy,” safety Robert Smith said. “I had some skips and I had a couple of clean hits, but I can say when you tackle him, it is like tackling a tree trunk.”
Smith says they can’t let what happened last year affect how they play against the Bulldogs this year. He said they saw up close and personal how good Gurley and Marshall are and what they are capable of doing.
“We can’t forget, but we can’t let that hinder what we want to do,” he said.
What Clemson wants to do is shut the Georgia running game down, but try not get so focused on stopping the run that it forgets about Hutson Mason and all the other offense weapons the Bulldogs have.
“If we can hold Gurley down, that definitely helps, but you can’t think like that because they have a quarterback in Hutson Mason that has been waiting all those years behind Aaron Murray so he is ready to show what he can do,” Smith said. “You just can’t say we have to shut down Todd Gurley and the game will be fine. Hudson Mason is a great quarterback and he manages the game and the offense so he is anxious to go out there and perform and show what he can do, too.”
Even still, Swinney, along with defensive coordinator Brent Venables, surely would be sleeping a whole lot better at night if they did not have to worry about Todd Gurley and the Georgia running game.
“If you don’t take care of that, it is going to be a nightmare of a game,” Venables said.