Elliott Details Areas For Clemson's Offense To Improve This Spring
CLEMSON — Clemson offensive coordinator Tony Elliott has an engineering background and a passion for numbers.
That comes in handy when analyzing his side of the ball and figuring out where he needs to work on during spring practice.
Despite a season in which the Tigers scored 43.9 points per game and totaled a school-record 7,931 yards (528.7 per game), Elliott and the Clemson staff found needed improvements when they self-evaluated.
The first area was third downs. The Tigers converted 44.2 percent of their third down, good enough for 27th nationally, but they weren’t as efficient as they needed to be when it really counted.
“We weren’t good those last two games (against Ohio State and LSU) on third down, particularly third-and-3,” Elliott said. “Overall, our percentage wasn’t there. We weren’t as good as we needed to be. We were really good on third-and-6, that medium area. And then in short yardage, we didn’t hit our goal of 75 percent. We were at 68 percent.”
Something else Elliott found is something fans and critics of the program were well aware of. He even had a smile on his face when he explained the playcalls.
“When we broke it down, we were really good at running the football (on third down),” he said. “We took some chances throwing the football, so we learned we probably need to hand the ball to (running back) Travis (Etienne) a little more in those short-yardage situations if you want to convert.”
Overall, Clemson was 5-of-14 on third downs in a 29-23 win in the Fiesta Bowl and just 1-of-9 in the national championship game. It was the worst third-down conversion percentage (9.09) of the Dabo Swinney era.
“We didn't finish the way we wanted to offensively, but when you step back and look at it, we accomplished a lot of things,” Elliott said.
One of those was touchdown percentage in the red zone, but while the Tigers ranked ninth nationally at 76.12 percent, Elliott wants to make sure they clean up a few inefficiencies down there.
“When you dial it back, our touchdown percentage in the red zone was really, really good, but we had a turnover in the red zone. We missed a couple of field goals,” Elliott said. “We had a couple of end-of-game situations where we didn’t convert when we went for it. So those are some of the biggest things.”
And then there’s tempo, a key element to the Clemson offense. During the Chad Morris era, the Tigers were among the national leaders in plays per game, but that’s dropped off some since Elliott and former co-OC Jeff Scott took over in 2015.
“Around here, we always try to get to 80 plays, but the last couple of years we’ve been around 72,” Elliott said. “Now, we’re a lot more explosive than when we had those 80 plays, but we’re trying to find that happy medium where we can get our snap count up without jeopardizing our efficiency and our explosiveness.”
