By William Qualkinbush.

After a beginning of the season that saw his team on the road more often than not, a long stretch of home games gave Jack Leggett confidence the wins would start rolling in for the Clemson Tigers.

After back-to-back losses to Wake Forest, however, the head coach—while still holding onto confidence things will turn around—admitted on Saturday he finds himself in unchartered waters.

“Absolutely, it’s frustrating,” Leggett said of his team’s inability to find answers. “I’m used to winning and used to having us figure things out and not going through a spell like we have.”

The Tigers fell to the Demon Deacons at home on Saturday by a score of 7-3. In many ways, it seemed a carryover from Friday’s 8-2 defeat.

A shaky performance from a starting pitcher was exacerbated by defensive miscues and missed opportunities at the plate. An early 1-0 lead went by the wayside in a multi-run inning that felt like a downhill spiral as one mistake compounded another.

This is not the way Leggett’s teams traditionally play, especially not this deep into a season.

“Every time we’ve seemed to make a mistake, defensively or whatever, it’s come back to haunt us,” he said. “It’s turned into two runs, three runs, four runs. That’s something we have to be a little bit more mentally strong to shut down.”

Clearly, Clemson hasn’t been at its best, but Wake Forest is no slouch as a team, either. The Demon Deacons are among the nation’s best offensive teams and boast the ACC’s top hitter in Will Craig, who has hit a pair of home runs in the series. His ninth-inning bomb in Friday’s game hit the left-centerfield scoreboard so hard that the sound reverberated back behind home plate—not an easy thing to do.

“They’re a good hitting team,” Leggett said. “We gave them an extra out in that one inning, and that kind of came back to snap us in that four-run inning.”

Giving opposing teams extra outs would be forgivable if Clemson’s own offense was picking up the slack. Alas, the Tigers have proven capable of getting on base, but scoring those baserunners has been problematic.

In the past two games, Clemson has three hits in 17 at-bats with runners in scoring position. Only three players in those two combined games have had multiple hits, while the Demon Deacons have had six such players. Rallies are often the product of multiple quality at-bats in a row, something the Tigers have had trouble with all season long.

“Every game that we lose, there are three or four guys in the lineup that are oh-fer,” Leggett said. “We haven’t really found that consistency yet and gotten that big hit that kind of opens things for us and makes us relax.”

Leggett has never had a team below the .500 mark after 25 games, but he is not finished with this group yet. There is a big difference between “can’t” and “haven’t yet” in sports, and that difference spurs Leggett onto a Sunday game that is unmistakably important for the future of his club.

“There’s no other option,” he said matter-of-factly. “We can’t get negative or throw in the towel or try to figure out what all is going wrong. We’ve got to try to figure out what we’re capable of doing and start playing like we can.”