Freshman offensive lineman Brayden Jacobs had his coming-out party in Clemson’s dominating 41-10 win over Boston College.

With starting left tackle Tristan Leigh still dealing with a nagging injury, Jacobs heard his number called early on against the Eagles, and the first-year player had by far his best performance of his young career. Jacobs played 65 snaps, and was mostly dominant all night long.

However, as good as he was, Dabo Swinney was pretty clear that Leigh is still the guy at left tackle when he gets back from the injury.

“He’s played one game,” Swinney said of Jacobs during his weekly press conference on Tuesday. “In that game, in that moment, he played really well. But we got a ton of confidence in Tristan.”

At the same time, after Jacobs’ performance on Saturday night, the staff might not feel the need to rush Leigh back.

“We got to get Tristan 100% and hopefully he’s headed in that direction,” Swinney added. “But we’ve got more confidence certainly in Braden now because he has finally taken it to game day. There’s been other times we have put him in there and really needed him to just play some tackle, and he just really wasn’t as confident. But that was big for him.”

As a consensus four-star propsect Jacobs was one of the crown jewels of the Tigers’ last recruiting class. He was widely seen as one of the top tackles in the class. Only defensive tackle Amare Adams was rated higher.

Standing 6-foot-8 and weighing more than 350 pounds, Jacobs is a mountain of a man. Basically one of those immovable objects.

After playing just one snap in the opener against LSU, Jacobs logged five the following week against Troy. He made a couple of errors in those early appearances that he chalked up to still adjusting to the speed of the game.

“I let the game speed me up,” Jacobs said. Coach Swinney always says that you can’t let the game speed you up and that is exactly what I did. And that is why I had the errors that I had.”

And Jacobs gives a lot of the credit to his head coach for the rapid improvement he’s already shown.

“It feels like coach Swinney knows me better than me sometimes,” he said. “After I had those struggles in the Troy game, he was just telling me that he believed in me. That he believes that I can be a great player for them and that I need to just focus on being me.”

Photo by Eric Canha-Imagn Images