One area that isn’t talked about when a squad loses as many seniors in one year as Clemson did last season is the structure of practice in the regular season. Practice during the course of a season has a different mentality than it does in fall camp, spring practices or even bowl practices.
There is a routine involved. There is a mentality. There is a time to know when to be ready to play and when not to.
Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney said this is the first normal week of practice his team has had to adjust to, and it had its hiccups. The 12th-ranked Tigers use Mondays as a light practice day so the players can get their legs back under them from the previous Saturday’s game. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are harder days as the Tigers dress in full pads and have more physical practices, while Thursday is another light day as the team goes over the game plan and how they will attack that week’s opponent.
“We lost a lot of guys … thirty four seniors or whatever it was last year that knew how to work. They knew the routine. They knew the mentality you had to bring on Tuesday and Wednesday practices,” Swinney said following Wednesday’s practice. “(Tuesday), I didn’t think we had quite the edge. It’s not that it was a bad practice, but we did not have quite the edge. It’s like I was reminding the staff this morning, ‘Hey, we have forty new guys out there that don’t really understand, and we have to re-teach that as far as this is what we do on a Tuesday practice.’
“The scouts were better (on Wednesday), everybody was better. The energy was better. I thought the mentality overall was where it needed to be so hopefully we can build on that and start building some consistency in our prep.”
However, this will be the only normal week Clemson will have until after the Notre Dame game on Oct. 3. The Tigers will have just four days to prepare for next Thursday’s game at Louisville, and then will have 16 days before playing the Irish.
“Obviously next week is not a normal week. Then you have an open date,” Swinney said. “The Notre Dame week is not a normal week because you have had two weeks to get ready and practices are structured a little differently. This has been a good little trial run for us this week.”
Clemson will host Appalachian State at 12:30 p.m. on Saturday in Death Valley.
First ACC game of the season. If Wake Forest was playing at the Carrier Dome to open the ACC regular season in basketball, it might draw a few more tickets and interest from the media, but Wake Forest at Syracuse kicking off the ACC season in football doesn’t have the same appeal. Nonetheless, two of the conference’s worst teams in 2014 will kickoff league play this Saturday.
There is, however, plenty of intrigue in the game. Last week, Wake Forest, led by quarterback John Wolford, piled up 591 yards of total offense against Elon, the most yards for the Deacons since 1975. Syracuse on the other hand held Rhode Island to just 64 yards of total offense, the fewest yards permitted by the Orange since 1967.
The Orange also lost starting quarterback Terrel Hunt for the season with an injured achilles, though freshman quarterback Eric Dungey came in and played well in his place.
“The thing we liked about Eric is we felt like we could run all of our offense. He has all the skill sets necessary to run this offense,” Syracuse head coach Scott Shafer said. “Nothing’s really changed other than he’ll get more reps in practice.
“Unfortunately we lost a great leader in Terrel Hunt with his injury, but we felt very comfortable with the progress Eric made throughout the course of camp. We’re excited to see him play in the second game.”
Not a good start for the ACC. Last year the ACC won more games against the other four Power 5 Conference schools than any other Power 5 Conference. That might not be the case this year.
The ACC went 0-4 against Power 5 Conference opponents in the opening weekend, including an 0-2 mark against the SEC. No. 6 Auburn hung on to defeat Louisville in the Chick-fil-A Kickoff Classic, while South Carolina rallied to beat North Carolina.
Virginia lost to 13th-ranked UCLA of the Pac 12, while Virginia Tech lost to top-ranked Ohio State of the Big Ten.
This Saturday, the Cavaliers will host No. 10 Notre Dame at 3:30 p.m. as the only big-time out of conference match up for the conference.
Three held under the century mark. It was not all bad for the ACC last week. There were some good performances as well. Three ACC teams (Boston College, Syracuse, Miami) held their opponents to under 100 total yards of offense last weekend, making the ACC the only conference to have three teams do so on the same weekend since the 2000 football season.
Miami held Bethune-Cookman to 79 total yards, while Boston College held Maine to 91 yards, its best defensive performance since 1992. Syracuse held Rhode Island to 64 total yards.