SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Clemson defensive coordinator Brent Venables says he has done a terrible job of getting his defense ready to play. This comes after his defense gave up a season-high 242 rushing yards in a 37-27 victory over Syracuse on Saturday.

It marked the third straight week the top-ranked Tigers allowed an opponent to rush for 135 or more yards. Clemson gave up 135 to NC State on Oct. 31. Then it followed that by allowing 197 yards against Florida State last weekend, and then there was the Orange’s performance in the Carrier Dome.

“You don’t continue to have those problems time and time again, and I’m doing something right,” Venables said. “I’m not doing anything right if that continues to happen so I did a very poor job of getting our guys to understand who is supposed to play the quarterback.”

The quarterback was Syracuse’s Zack Mahoney, who rushed for 76 yards and averaged 7.6 yards per carry. His longest run was 30 yards, while scoring on touchdowns of 10 and 12 yards.

“Time and time again, he got outside of us,” Venables said.

But Mahoney was not the only issue on Saturday. Running back George Morris rushed for 80 yards and had a run of 51 yards to set up one of Mahoney’s two touchdowns, while Ervin Phillips had a 28-yard run for a touchdown.

“I tip my hat on their performance,” linebacker B.J. Goodson said. “Honestly, I think their offense had a better day than our defense.”

In the last three games, Clemson has yielded runs of 30, 41, 42, 51 66 and 75 yards. So what’s the issue, and are the Tigers concerned?

“The thing about that is that they are all fixable things,” Goodson said. “It is nothing crazy or out of the ordinary. They are just tendencies that teams know that you are expecting so they are fading and going in another direction.”

Right now, Clemson seems to be going in another direction. In the first seven games of the season, the Tigers allowed 105.4 yards per game on the ground, which was one of the best figures in the nation. Opponents were averaging just 2.9 yards per carry.

Clemson held Louisville to 0.7 yards per carry, while it held Miami to 1.8 yards. The two teams combined for just 77 yards on 57 carries. That’s an average of 1.4 yards per carry.

But since the Miami game, the Tigers have been gashed in the running game. NC State, Florida State and Syracuse combined for 574 yards and averaged 6.3 yards per carry. In the last three games, the Tigers have surrendered 191.3 yards per game.

Venables said what Syracuse did on Saturday, the Tigers expected.

“They run zone-read option, split-zone, split flow,” he said.

“They are going to do it when it works,” Venables continued. “They ran it all kinds of different ways. We worked hard on it. You would like to blame it on ‘Oh, we were not ready.’ Obviously, whatever we had ready was not good.”

It wasn’t good, and the Tigers have to get it fixed fast as they head into the final two games of the regular season and the ACC Championship Game on Dec. 5.

“We have to respond and adjust better than we did today,” Goodson said.