Clemson Tigers LB Says Team Can't "Point Any Fingers" Following 3-4 Start of Season

Despite a two-game away win streak, the Clemson Tigers were unable to string another together following a 35-24 loss to SMU on Saturday afternoon.

After the game, while many fans and viewers pointed the blame in various directions, linebacker Sammy Brown said that the loss was a group issue, saying that everybody has things to work on.

“You can’t point any fingers,” Brown said, “but what we can do is come back to work on Monday.”

In the first half, the Clemson offense was the unit that struggled to get going. The Tigers only amassed seven points in the first half before going into the locker room down 16-7. The team believed that if the offense could string plays together, Clemson could be able to pick up its third straight win.

But when quarterback Christopher Vizzina and the offense put 17 points on the board in the final 30 minutes, the other side of the team collapsed.

The Mustangs scored a touchdown each time Clemson put points on the board, and fast. Besides the final drive, which was 13 plays, SMU used drives of six plays or less to get into the end zone.

Brown said that SMU made “some good halftime adjustments”, but that means that his team must do the same going forward.

“At the end of the day, we have halftime too, so we have got to make adjustments too,” he said.

Clemson enters another bye week this weekend, its second of the season. However, while an open date allows for key players to recover, as well as reset before the final stretch of the season, Brown is ready to play more games, looking to prove the team’s worth.

“It’s good and bad,” the linebacker said. “I mean, because you get your time to refocus, reset, but at the end of the day, I want to go back out there and reprove outselves, so got to wait two weeks for that.”

During the next two weeks, Brown believes that every position group has something that is needed to be improved upon. Clemson faces yet another tough stretch to end out the year, which concludes with the Palmetto Bowl at South Carolina at the end of November.

The shift focuses to making a bowl game, with the matchup at Williams-Brice Stadium potentially being the deciding game in whether Clemson makes its 21st straight bowl game.

“I think that every position group has certain things,” Brown said. “I know linebackers have certain aspects of the game we have to get better at, so I think just watching the film from this week, even going back to last week, finding things that we can work on. Finding the things from the game that can hurt us, and just every position group working what they can work on.”

For a team that has struggled to play complimentary football, something that head coach Dabo Swinney harps on frequently, the search to play that style of football will continue into November.

“I just felt like we couldn’t finish,” Brown said. “I just feel like the plays were there and we just couldn’t make them.”