Swinney, Clemson Tigers Offense Describe Halftime Changes Against Troy

Though the Clemson Tigers earned their first win of the season against Troy last Saturday, head coach Dabo Swinney and the team had multiple obstacles to jump to get to it.

Over 90 minutes of a rain delay and a 16-point deficit headlined the adversity, and as Swinney began his postgame press conference to the media, he put it simply: “Man, what a weird day.”

His offense showed flashes of production, but was unable to finish off drives, not to mention the ball didn’t bounce their way frequently.

From a fumble on fourth down, to drops by the receivers to a tipped pass pick-six to put the Trojans up by double digits, the Tigers went down 16-3 at the break. However, quarterback Cade Klubnik said nobody was worried about the deficit in the locker room at halftime.

“I don’t think anybody really felt panicked or anything,” Klubnik said after the game. “We know who we are, and we believe that, and there’s just some stuff that went the wrong way in the first half, and we couldn’t get in a rhythm. There’s a lot of game left, that’s really the biggest thing is I felt we got to go play two great quarters. . that just lit a fire underneath everybody.

Even in the previous week against LSU, the run game struggled to get going. Clemson only had 21 rushing yards on the ground at the break, and running back Adam Randall knew that his unit needed to get “a spark” going in the second half.

“We needed to get the offense going; [we] hadn’t played well in the first half,” he said. “I think that just poor ball security, some unfortunate mishaps, tipped ball, interception, but, at the end of the day, that’s football.”

And that spark came through coaching adjustments by Swinney and the rest of his coaching staff.

Seeing the way the Trojans were attacking the box, the team switched from its zone blocking to its gap schemes, seeing much more success coming out of the tunnel in the second half .

“We made some adjustments at halftime,” Swinney said. “We went to a little bit more of our gap schemes instead of our zones. They were running a lot of inside twists. Like the first run, they were picking our center. They were blocking back on our center, picking and then looping a guy, so they had a lot of gains inside.”

Randall would run all over the Troy defense with 96 rushing yards in the second half, including 59 yards on the team’s opening drive at half. The offense would score a touchdown through their senior back.

“Those guys up front, tight ends did a heck of a job creating big gaps for him,” Klubnik said. “It’s tough to take him down, and for Adam to go play like he did, I don’t think anybody’s surprised. He plays with so much heart, and it was really good to see him. He just dominated and really carried the team on his back.”

“Shoutout to our coaches, though, too,” Randall added. “They came into the locker room in the second half, and they had great corrections and different schemes that we started to run out there, and we got to go finish.”

Klubnik was able to include his receivers as well, who tightened up on their mechanics in the second frame. The senior quarterback threw two touchdowns to sophomore Bryant Wesco Jr., including a 34-yard teardrop that put the Tigers in the driver’s seat.

Wesco, on the same page as the rest of the offense, was waiting for that finishing touch that the first half didn’t have, and it started to come around as the sky grew darker.

“Just execution was missing, that’s about the only thing,” he said. “When we went out there and started executing the plays, started taking care of the ball, you saw what happened.”

It was all about the “next half mentality”, and now, the team will have a next game mentality in Atlanta, Georgia, to face the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. The game will be Clemson’s first in ACC play.

A 16-point comeback like that is remembered for the rest of the season, not to mention it was only in the second week of the season. For Klubnik, it’s the largest comeback in his collegiate career, and it will be something that the entire team takes into a loaded schedule going forward.

“Troy’s a heck of a team,” he said. “They’re going to give their best fight, and they have a history of that. We can go and win by 60 and move on and be happy, but a game like this is going to make us better.

Whenever we get to the moment down the road when we are playing another great team, we are going to lean on this and see how we respond.”