Elliott: Louisville Is "Tough to Get a Beat on"
CLEMSON — The Louisville Cardinals enter this week's against No. 3 Clemson riding a wave of confidence that has not been seen in the commonwealth in nearly two years — having won four games, including back-to-back ACC wins.
Fresh off a win over then No. 24 Wake Forest, a game in which they scored 62 points, the Cardinals boast one of the most explosive offenses in the ACC. However, as good as their offense has been, their defense has been one of the worst in the ACC
In fact, Louisville ranks 12th out the league's 14 teams in scoring defense — allowing 31.5 points per game.
However, at least one member of the Clemson coaching staff sees an improving group of Cardinals when he looks at the film.
You know, watching Louisville, it's tough to get a beat [sic] on them," co-offensive coordinator Tony Elliott said. "It looks like they want to do one thing starting the season and now they're kind of settling in. They do some things different from a coverage standpoint than what we've seen in the last couple of weeks. We're really going to have to challenge our guys to be locked in. The good thing is there's some similarity in the front, so the last three weeks you've played a similar front, but they do some different things on the back end. Biggest thing for us is we're going to have to just communicate.
"Obviously, they're going to be excited to play. I'm sure they're going to have some wrinkles. They've given up some rushing yards, and some gains, they're giving them some passing yards, and so the biggest thing for us is if we can get off to a fast start and be efficient, and then just kind of get a feel for what they're going to do."
Even though the Cardinals have struggled defensively through the first six games of the 2019 season, Elliott believes that they are a group that is playing with a lot more confidence than they were at this time last season.
And the stats back up that claim.
Last year, the Cardinals gave up more than 44 points a game, a total of 529 points over their 12 games. But under first year defensive coordinator Brian Brown, the Cardinals are playing with more confidence and fire.
"Last year I think that at that point in the season they kind of knew something was going on with the coaching staff, and so there just wasn't a lot of fighting effort in them. This year, they're playing hard," Elliott said. "I mean they're probably not the biggest guys. It's a little bit of a contrast, similar structure, but they're going to play their technique different than what we saw last week because they're not quite as big as the guys at Florida State, but that gives them an opportunity to move a little bit more, more active in the run game, so we're going to have to do a good job of catching movement.
"They're just playing hard. It looks like they believe in the scheme. You can tell, I think...those guys are going to play with some fire and some tenacity. That's what you're seeing. They're playing hard they're flying to the football. They still making a couple of mistakes that you can tell with the new unit playing together and each week when you game plan you're going to have different wrinkles. But overall they're playing a lot harder."
The Tigers' understand what they must do to have success against a team like Louisville — they must run the ball.
"They play some trap technique there to the field, play some cover too," Elliott said. "A little bit more cover too than what we've seen, so that's probably going to put us in a situation where we've got to be efficient running the football until we can make them fit that extra defender so we can exploit them in the pass game."
