Re: Quozzel?

I appreciate the (undeserved!) shout-out...but I am way more out of the loop than I'm used to right now. Hood and the gang have been around the team since camp resumed; I haven't at all this year.

Just from what I've gathered from my friends who are in the loop, they're mildly concerned - I don't know they'd use the word "worried" - about receivers not called Amari, but they think our DL will be much-improved once the young guys get worked in and they really like our back seven on D. They also say our OL is paper-thin...yes, the freshmen are a good-looking bunch but they're also freshmen; OL is not a kid's position and it really does take usually two years before a guy is ready to really compete, much less dominate so the kids are going to have to grow up fast. (As an aside, I really don't like that Clemson only carries 15-16 OL on scholarship; I'd personally prefer to see 18-19 precisely because OL is so hard to evaluate until Year 2 or Year 3 and they do take longer to develop than any other position, but that's an old complaint going back to Tommy Bowden's day.) Our RB pool is just stupidly deep right now; even Alabama doesn't usually have what we apparently have right now...biggest problem there is, there's only 1 ball. (Uptown problems!) We should hopefully get a lot more out of the TE position this year so hopefully that will offset the younger WR corps.

All I've got. Hood and the Clemson-beat regulars are way more plugged-in than I am, especially this year.

quozzel

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Sep 4, 2020, 12:26 PM

The numbers just haven't been there. I've always heard Robbie Caldwell's a solid position coach and his players seem to like him. He just has never been a rampaging ball of fire on the recruiting trail...and Clemson's (comparitive, we have had some guys) lack of success putting OL into the League relative to other positions has always gotten us beaten upside the head on the recruiting trail, particularly by the likes of Georgia. As a result we've had to reach and often reach late for guys and hope they worked out; we got lucky banking on smaller numbers of lightly-recruited regional guys like Tremayne Anchrum and now apparently Jordan McFadden but ordinarily you're not going to make a living recruiting shorter tackles (both guys are listed at 6'3" but look shorter) who are low-to-mid-tier 3-star guys coming out of high school either. And some of the guys we rolled the dice on have not really panned out. Which happens at OL. Again, it often takes a couple of years before you get a field-ready product. Especially if you're not loading up on guys like Jackson Carman you're living kind of dangerously going slim on numbers, IMHO.

I'll go ahead and admit my son is an FBS OL, and he worked out with one of Batson's former guys when he was home during the COVID shutdown, so we got some particular scoop on that during and after the process. Some of that is just culture; different schools prioritize different positions; the school my son is at, for instance, has 22 guys in its OL room at the moment and 19 of them are on scholarship, and another of them is about to be. And their focus on the technical end of development is apparently a good bit more detailed and exacting than what Clemson does as well. I do wish Clemson would focus just a bit more on the OL. Probably the area of biggest potential improvement for us, IMHO.

Of course, Clemson did sign a highly uncharacteristic bumper crop of high-end guys last year, too, so it seems the staff might have already changed its approach there.

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