It's about time. I think this season proves one ridiculous over-generalization that sounds good when introducing a blogpost: take away Tommy Bowden's extreme tendency to err on the side of caution with something slightly more adventurous and we have ourselves a division champion. But it's important to remember that Tommy Bowden played an enormous role as the architect of this team, and to overlook him wouldn't be all that's right and fair. And since I'm in such great spirits, here it is: congratulations to you too, Tommy. May you find peace with the millions we bought out your contract with and thank you, thank you, for choosing to step aside while CJ Spiller still had a year of eligibility left.
To be clear, not tryin' to shortchange Swinney, Napier, Steele, and everyone else here--they did a fantastic job. The next two years will give us a better idea of the direction the program will take as Swinney starts to shape it according to his ideal...but for now we can rejoice that Swinney was able to do more with essentially the same talent as his predecessor, and that's great news that could lead to many happy days ahead for the team and its fans. And guys, I would really appreciate it if you can remove the 18-year weight I've been carrying around in two weeks by beating GT.
Now, the game...not the prettiest sight in the world, I'm glad we had things locked up or I would have been way too emotionally invested for a game against 3-7 Virginia. This is the second straight game we can attribute the ease of victory to to the offense. It wasn't perfect, the already much-maligned fourth down call and more glaringly the inability to put together a clock-killing drive in the fourth quarter stand out as negatives. I'm thinking the plan was to try and give Spiller as many yards as he could gather in the fourth quarter, but Virginia's defense isn't going to give up too many yards to our O-line when they know the run is coming. I'm not even sure this was even a good idea to begin with, Spiller is progressively getting less and less mobile each week. But I nitpick. When Kyle Parker hits his first 12 (?) passes, things are clicking and we're probably on our way to putting plenty of points on the board.
I have to sympathize with the defense quite a bit, Al Groh and Gregg Brandon threw the entire playbook at them in the first half (after the first drive). I'm not sure why Virginia slowed down in the second half, although they might simply have run out of unorthodox plays to run. What this game shows is that our defense is still most vulnerable to a strong running game between the tackles, the "trick" plays Virginia ran were all set up by strong running (part of that was the wildcat--as an aside, good to get a dose of it now 'cause we could be seeing it in a not-to-distant bowl game). A lot of this was enabled partly by overpursuit by Clemson LBs (again), not to mention some stupid penalties. Maye always seems to find a way to redeem himself, though, that helmet on the football-forcing-fumble was a thing of beauty.
That's enough. Its time to bask--we captured the Atlantic Division! And next week we extend our win streak to 7 games by throttling our "rival" downstate.
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