During Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney’s weekly radio show Monday night, a caller brought up how Swinney mentioned heading into this season that this is the fastest team he’s had, with the caller saying that’s not showing up on the field in terms of explosive plays.

The caller said it feels like the Tigers’ offense is “playing with a lid on it,” and asked Swinney what needs to happen for Clemson to “bust the top off of this thing and really start to make some plays downfield.”

Swinney said it all boils down to “style of play,” adding that the offense did indeed have “a lid on it” in the Duke and Wake Forest games due to how the Blue Devils and Demon Deacons defended the Tigers — as opposed to how Syracuse’s defense played against Clemson in a game where the offense had a bunch of big plays down the field.

“It’s style of play. We’ve played two teams where there was a lid on it,” Swinney said. “If you’ve studied the Duke game and you studied this past week, they played with a lid. So, you have to move the ball, and we were certainly able to do that. I think we’re 17th in the country in plays of 10-plus yards. I mean, to get plays of 20-plus yards, it’s style of play. What happened at Syracuse? Big plays left and right because of their style of play. They played a lot of tight coverage, a lot of man, and so there was no way they were going to let us run the ball. They’re like, ‘You’re not running the ball.’ Very early in the game in the first quarter, we’re like, ‘We’re going to have to get the ball (down the field),’ and so what’d we do? We went up and down the field and big-played them and had some huge, huge plays down the field.

“The Duke game, it’s 15-play drives. We had almost 500 yards against Duke, but their philosophy was ‘we’re going to make them finish drives,’ and we had two first-and-goals on the 1 and we didn’t finish. We had two blocked kicks, and we had a lot of stats and a lot of yards, but we didn’t finish. And then this past week, they came in and that was their philosophy – they said, ‘We’re going to stay on top of everything and we’re going to make you run the ball,’ and so we did. So, it’s just kind of style of play. A lot of that dictates that.”

Swinney continued, saying “you don’t just line up and people are playing drop 8 coverage and just have explosive 20-plus yard plays.”

“That’s why they’re playing drop 8, to force you to have to see if you can run the ball and see if you got patience and see if you can complete the drives with underneath stuff, and that’s really kind of what happened (vs. Wake Forest),” Swinney said. “There was a couple of opportunities where we might could’ve made a play or two. Like, we had a big fourth-down conversion. They went Cover 0, and we had a big conversion there with Beaux (Collins), and we missed a couple of opportunities. We missed two down the seams.”

Swinney added that the Tigers have done “a lot of good things” offensively through six games this season.

“We’ve outgained every opponent that we’ve played,” Swinney said. “We’ve been pretty dang good on third down. We had two big drops the other day, otherwise we would’ve been over 50 percent again. So, there’s been a lot of good things. But when you say ‘put a lid on it’ – it’s style of play, who you’re playing. You’re going to throw a bunch of interceptions if you’re throwing it into a bunch of 2 Robber (coverage). You’re trying to throw the ball down the field, it’s not very smart. So, we’re trying to win. So, when we’ve had opportunities, we’ve made some plays.”

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