Eason was gone in 2018. You are thinking of the 2017 game. If we are still comparing that to Clemson for some reason then we are comparing a game that we were down 17-7 at halftime to a game that we were down 52-7 at halftime.
The biggest problem I have with the "if he wanted to" myth is that people don't seem to use it in both cases. Kirby possibly could have run the score up that high but Dabo could have pretty easily gone well over 100 points if he wanted to as well.
I'll agree that we dropped off a little at the end of CPJ's career, but I think the bigger factor is that the rest of the Coastal was making changes to keep up with the rest of college football, and we weren't. It wasn't until 2018 that we had a legit uniform partner, or the new locker rooms that replace the 30 year old ones. We had fewer recruiting personnel than Duke by like 2016 or something. Duke had winning seasons back to back for the first time in who knows how long after 2014 or so.
I’ll refer you to @JacketOff response to you, but will add a few things directly related to what you brought up.
Because I saw the this immediately, then I saw the rest of the post and there was nothing worth responding to. Here you go though.
"forced third downs" might be the most irrelevant data point I've seen when trying to defend giving up over 4 ppd. I was just letting you have your thing, as I don't feel the need to comment on a made up stat (FEI, FPI, SP+ do not use "total third downs forced" so I am going to trust them on the irrelevance of it).
Regarding the difference in offense, well, I have ignored the fact that the starters were out of the Clemson game in 2020 in all but one drive of the second half, and was just letting the numbers be what they were. I don't really care to go look up what the actual PPD of starter vs starter is, but i know the first half ppd of the 2018 game was drastically less than the first half ppd of the 2020 game. The 2020 offense is also currently only 0.03 OFEI points better than they were in 2018 (0.07 better if you remove the ND game which I think is fair to do). ESPN team efficiencies has 2018 Clemson offense tied to 2020. SP+ has 2018 slightly better (43.0 vs 42.7). I am not sure if I would say 2018 Clemson was much worse offensively than 2020 Clemson.
Clemson's last drive in 2018 included 2 passes and ended on a 30 yard touch down pass (by Lawrence). This occurred while they were up 21 with 2 minutes to play. The previous drive also included two passes, but one of them was intercepted. Acting like Clemson wasn't passing and wasn't trying to score in the 2018 game in the second half is, again, disingenuous. Total plays doesn't tell the whole story. Clemson definitely seems to let its second string players play a wider range of the playbook in blowouts than most teams, but I am not sure 2018 and 2020 were much different (apart from the 4th down conversions being head scratchers for sure).
Never said it was. I claimed both were exceptionally bad. But even points per play was worse in the 2020 game (0.83 vs 0.64). The only stats you have tried to support your argument with are time of possession and forced third downs, and no other stat backs up your assertion. The whole basis of this conversation was when you inadvertently calculated PPD wrong, and instead of admitting the mistake, have doubled down. Like I said, I agree with your general thesis that the 73 points surrendered isn't as bad as people have made it out to be, but it certainly *is* really bad.
Oh, ye of little faith!
But he was. It just wasn't a bowl team using his offense. Though, I'll admit, the creeping OL injuries last year made establishing offensive consistency pretty difficult. If Paul had to deal with that we might have only won 6 or so.
Considering what happened in 2015 when we were plagued with similar injury issues, I doubt last year would have been much better under CPJ.
First of all, I’m not defending giving up 4 PPD lmao. Not sure why you think that. I’m saying that the performance in 2020 is not that much worse, if worse at all, than the performance in 2018. But regarding third downs, it’s not relevant that the 2018 Clemson team had fewer third down opportunities than total drives? Meaning Tech’s defense was so inadequate at stopping them that they couldn’t even average one third down per drive? That means Clemson was getting first downs at will, with basically no opposition. It’s like playing against air.
Of course the first half PPD data is better in 2018 than 2020. Trevor Lawrence didn’t start. I‘ve already covered that. Lawrence didn’t even get in the game until there were 11 minutes left in the 2nd quarter. He then led 4 first half drives, 3 of them resulted in touchdowns with 1 ending on an interception. Lawrence played 2 drives in the second half, the first one and the last one. Both were touchdowns. That’s 5 touchdowns in 6 drives, or 83% of drives since you’re so numbers oriented. Lawrence led 11 drives in 2020 (coincidentally the same amount Clemson had total in 2018 and only scored 3 more points) and 7 of them led to touchdowns. That’s 63%. So the 2020 defense was able to stop the junior version of Trevor Lawrence from scoring touchdowns at a better clip than the 2018 team was at stopping the freshman version. The 2020 team also forced an interception, a punt, and a field goal while Lawrence was in the game. The 2018 team only had 1 interception. That’s 16% of drives where Lawrence was “shut down” compared to 27% in 2020.
Clemson’s 2018 second half run/pass split was 24/11. In 2020 that split is 18/22. That means that Clemson threw more passes than they had runs in 2020. In 2018 they had double the running plays as they did passing plays. Plus the 2 fourth-down conversions and it’s very obvious Clemson was trying to score as much and as quickly as possible in 2020 when they simply didn’t do that in 2018. It’s not disingenuous. You’re just not looking, and you’re ignoring to the total and main points in my post.
I admitted my mistake, lmao. But your entire argument depends solely on that mistake mattering. It doesn’t, and it doesn’t matter for what I’m trying to say, which is that the 2018 defense got whipped up and down the field *just as bad* if not *worse* than the 2020 defense did. This is evident, I’ve provided numerous sources and validations for my argument. If you want to call me disingenuous or get on your high horse some more then that’s great. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me. I never wanted to have this argument in the first place. It’s dumb, and it’s part of what I was trying to avoid in my original comment anyway. The truth is that Georgia, Clemson, and Minnesota whipped CPJ’s team’s a$$ in 2018 just like Georgia and VT in 2019 and Clemson in 2020 have whipped CGC’s a$$. My original point was that CPJ’s offense was able to hide these a$$ whippings on the scoreboard better because of the offense he ran, while CGC’s teams aren’t able to do that, therefore it looks like his teams are underperforming much worse than they actually are. That was the entire reason for my original post. I don’t care about a 0.6 PPD difference. I don’t care about FEI or S&P+ ratings. I don’t even care about slight numerical differences between games played 2 years apart. They’re irrelevant to what I was trying to say anyway.
1- 4 during the previous HC's last 5 years vs Duke indicates that we weren't getting anywhere close to 2014 levels anytime soon, a year where we lost to a terrible UNC Team and needed a blown call to beat Ga Southern in their 1st year with 85 schollies
It was at BDS and i do remember the look on PJ's face at that one. He was totally disheartened. It was the game Eason transferred after that season. We were totally beaten in that game. It wasn't that bad at the half but it got really ugly. That Minnesota game was a bad one too but the circumstances of him leaving did not leave much to play for and they had a dominant OL. I do believe he had had enough the last couple of years and knew it was time.
Uh huh. 2014 was a farse...well then so was 1990. We played a lot of weak teams and got lucky in some games.....please stop attacking our most successful coach since Dodd.
My strong belief is that we have no idea until he can recruit an offensive line that isn’t a sieve and defensive players who can run and tackle. He’s had 1 recruiting class of his own. And the one thing GT has needed for decades is a marketeer. You obviously don’t talk to high school athletes or coaches. I do as my son is a senior high school football player in South Georgia, And let me say, prior to our marketeer arriving on the scene, players nor coaches even gave GT football a glance. I had a coach tell me, as I was wearing my GT hat, that the only players he would push towards GT were those who had lower tier offers. He said legit D1 players, even fringe types, had so many better options than Johnson in this area. He even said there’s a reason Johnson succeeded in D2 but couldn’t replicate it at GT. Point being, no one in the football arena from players to coaches really care about academics. It’s all lip service. They want to be prepped for the NFL because they all believe they are going. GT football is not special in this regard. We are 1 of a dozen D1 programs in this area that kids now look at. We need a marketeer desperately.
Amen from the Congregation!