The biggest issue I see and have seen when the offense fails like this is the timing and leverage. While sometimes you see a guy that seems to be going after the wrong assignment for blocking, often they make it to their guy either too early, too late, or have the wrong angle relative to the ball carrier behind him.
The ball carrier should ideally be sprinting toward the designed alley right before the blockers are about to make contact with their assignment. Instead, I often see blockers making contact and the ball carrier still hesitating and continuing to move wide instead of seeing the alley and shifting to 6th (or vice versa when the blocker has outside leverage, the ball carrier goes inside). There's the "should I go inside or outside" hesitation which seems to be more than enough time for the defender to beat the block and make the play. Sometimes they run straight into their blocker or get way too close and the defender can just lunge at them; I think this is because the ball carrier is looking beyond at the second layer of blocking possibly because he thinks that first block can be maintained longer than it really can/is?
So yes, there are times where our guys are completely whiffing the block or not even going in the right direction but whenever I review the film, if we can improve the timing, decisiveness, and instincts about what their teammate/blocker is trying to do for them (we'll call this "swarm think" for comic relief) then we would have better production on offense.
Now admittedly, the above does not explain the first half of the game last night. I think that is all about Clemson timing the snap or something weird because they are getting crazy penetration up the middle that was disrupting Justin's footwork.
