By Will Vandervort.
Dabo Swinney says it only takes four or five mistakes in the red zone each season to kill a team’s percentage. Last year, Clemson had that many in one game.
In their 23-17 overtime loss at Florida State last season, the Tigers missed on a pass to a wide open tight end that would have easily scored a touchdown. Then they followed that by missing on 23-yard field goal attempt, which was followed later by a snap going over the quarterback’s head when they had first-and-goal from the one-yard line.
With the clock winding down in the game, they fumbled at the 14-yard line which took away an opportunity to win it in regulation. In overtime, they failed to convert on fourth-and-inches from the 16-yard line.
“Maybe we were not quite as well personnel wise this year as we were last year,” said Swinney of the things he thinks about when evaluating a certain area on the field or position. “We have to get better there. Maybe we are not quite as good at quarterback or whatever. You miss a couple of kicks and you have a couple of turnovers, and that gets skewed pretty quickly.”
The Tigers ranked 113th in red-zone scoring last year, converting on just 38 of their 52 attempts once they got inside an opponent’s 20-yard line. In eight different games, Clemson failed to score at least once when entering the red zone.
The Tigers were 1-for-3 against a Syracuse team that was among the worst in the ACC in 2014, while they also failed to score in one of their five red zone trips against Georgia State. These are issues Swinney and his staff know they have to address this spring.
“It was a week-to-week type of deal in some cases,” Swinney said. “We had some consistency from some guys, but we were trying to figure out running back and we had guys that kept getting hurt… There were just a lot of dynamics, the same thing at tight end and obviously on the offensive line. Then there was the injury with Deshaun (Watson).”
Scoring touchdowns were a big problem for the Tigers once they got in the red zone in 2014.
Clemson scored just 25 touchdowns in its 52 attempts (48.1 percent) inside the 20, which also ranked 113th nationally and is the lowest in the Swinney era.
“We are going to be better offensively this year,” the Clemson coach said.
“We definitely have the personnel. We recruited very well,” Swinney continued. “Artavis (Scott) was a guy this time last spring that we hoped would be a good player you know, but he has kind of been there and done that now. We hoped we would get a little something out of (Germone Hopper). He had his best year. Can he take it to another level this year from a consistency standpoint and a daily commitment?
“The personnel here is definitely better and a healthy Deshaun Watson will be a big factor in that. I think the improvement in the offensive line, the little added experience at wide receiver and getting Charone Peak back healthy—another big loss for us last year in the middle part of the year—so there is a lot of pieces to the puzzle that are here. We just have to kind of put it all together.”
When Chad Morris came to Clemson in 2011 to be its offensive coordinator, one of the main areas the Tigers need to improve upon was red zone scoring, in particular scoring touchdowns.
In 2010, Clemson ranked as one of the worst teams in the country when it came to red zone efficiency. The Tigers converted on just 73.9 percent of their attempts, including just 25 touchdowns in their 51 attempts. That came out to a conversion rate of 54.4 percent.
In Morris’ first year the Tigers increased those numbers dramatically as they rose to 80.3 percent, nearly a seven-point jump. They scored 32 touchdowns in 56 red zone attempts. Not great, but much better.
But in 2012 and 2013, Clemson became one of the best red-zone scoring teams in the country. The Tigers led the nation in 2012, scoring on 56 of their 59 attempts or 94.9 percent of the time. Of those 56 attempts, 43 were touchdowns – a 72.9 percent conversion rate.
There was a slight drop in 2013, but not by much. Clemson still ranked among the nation’s leaders, scoring on 51 of their 60 attempts, including 41 touchdowns.
But was Morris, who is now the head coach at SMU, really the mastermind behind Clemson’s success during that three-year run or was it due to personnel more than anything else? Let’s not forget, the Tigers had quarterback Tajh Boyd and Sammy Watkins play in all three of those years, while DeAndre Hopkins, Dwayne Allen, Martavis Bryant and Andre Ellington also helped during some of that run.
After Boyd graduated and Watkins and Bryant jumped ship for the NFL a year early, Clemson saw its red zone numbers drop to its lowest form under Swinney at 73.7 percent.
“When you look at our red zone issues, it only takes about four or five of those things and you are right there in the top five in the country,” Swinney said. “As you evaluate it, what is correctable? We had a couple of huge turnovers in the red zone. We had a couple of snaps go over our quarterback’s head. Those are things that can’t happen.
“There were a couple of times we got whipped. It was not a bad call. Their guys were just better than our guys.”
Those are things that obviously have to get fixed. And as Swinney said, it starts right now, in the spring.