Clemson offense ready to get back to explosive ways with Watson
In spite of an injury-interrupted freshman season, a case could be made that Clemson's Deshaun Watson is the best returning ACC quarterback. Especially in terms of sheer talent.
The glimpses of Watson -- what he did against Florida State in Tallahassee in the game that cemented him as a starter (19-of-28 for 266 yards), then going 44-of-65 for 702 yards in consecutive games as the starter against North Carolina -- were incredibly tantalizing.
Then he broke his hand against Louisville in his third career start, only to miss the next three games with the injury before attempting just six passes in a loss at Georgia Tech and spraining his knee.
He led the Tigers to a win against South Carolina in the regular-season finale on, as it turned out, a partially-torn ACL suffered in practice. But he still completed 14-of-19 passes for 269 yards.
All told, he finished his freshman season completing 67.9 percent of his passes for an average of 10.7 yards per attempt, throwing 14 touchdowns to just two interceptions.
He has some mobility, but it's his big arm that makes his special. Now, though, he's headed into his sophomore season coming off of a spring where he spent it on the sidelines rehabbing the torn ACL instead of getting valuable reps with teammates.
Watson nearly played in Clemson's Russell Athletic Bowl win over Oklahoma on the torn ACL, but he was held out and had surgery to repair the ACL on Dec. 12.
At least that decision likely helped put him where he is now -- ahead of schedule, according to his head coach Dabo Swinney.
"He's doing great. His rehab is way ahead of schedule, and he's just a great worker in everything that he does. But he was able to do a lot this spring from a football standpoint, drill work and things like that, throwing," Swinney said.
"Every day, every team period, he would kind of mentally rep. I really just basically had him with me the whole time when we would do our competitive team stuff, so he had to really mentally stay sharp."
Watson hasn't been alone in the rehab room. Running backs Zac Brooks and Adam Choice have been in there with him, and Clemson released a video documenting their efforts to get back to full strength.
That part should be more of a formality. The question will be if he can stay healthy, of course, but it will also be whether or not he can maintain that level of confidence and fearlessness he played with a season ago.
"This time last year he was just trying to kind of earn his way, if you will, and now he's just a whole other level from a mentality standpoint in that he's had great success in his games. He's played in Tallahassee," Swinney said.
"His confidence is -- not that it was not good last year, but it's one thing to plan to go do it, it's another thing when you've done it. Just expecting to have him take it to another level from a mental standpoint."
Adding to that mental challenge will be the fact that he'll have a new offensive coordinator this season -- or, more accurately, two new offensive coordinators. Chad Morris was long a hot coaching commodity, and he finally left to take the head job at SMU after last season. Now, Jeff Scott and Tony Elliott will take over as co-offensive coordinators and call the plays.
Clemson had long been an offensive juggernaut under Morris (particularly with quarterback Tajh Boyd), but last year was a bit of a transition. Other than the explosiveness the offense showed with Watson, it was -- relatively speaking, by previous Clemson standards -- pedestrian.
Some coaches tend to gravitate more towards one side of the ball and hire a really good coordinator to handle the side they're less comfortable with. Swinney was a bit of an exception there in that he's very comfortable with the offense and yet had one of the best OC's in the nation in Morris.
Swinney has a way that he wants the Clemson offense to operate, and he feels that it will continue to go that way in spite of the loss of Morris.
"I hope we're better. I hope we continue to improve. But as far as what we do, that's not going to change. Your scheme in just fundamentals of your scheme can tweak from year to year based on your personnel, based on what you have and things like that, but the philosophy of what we do is the same," Swinney said.
"That's why I hired Chad. It's because this is the philosophy we were going to have in place, it's what we're going to do, and ... it's a Clemson offense, a Clemson defense, a Clemson philosophy. Coaches are going to come and go, but we don't change for a coach. We have something that we believe in and that we've recruited to."
The only thing that will change, really, is the person (or people, in this case) calling the plays.
At the very least, that should give Watson and the rest of the Clemson offense some continuity as they seek to pick it up this season.
Clemson finished in the top 10 in the nation in total offense in 2012 and 2013. Last year, they fell down to 61, their worst finish in total offense since 2010 when they finished 88th. Morris was brought in the next year, when the offense shot up to 26th.
"As far as guys calling plays and things like that, sometimes maybe there's a different personality from time to time, but the philosophy is the same, and most people will watch us and they won't see anything different as far as how we play," Swinney said.
"Hopefully we'll do some things better certainly than we did last year, but a lot of that, that's not Chad, that's just personnel and having some more things available to us than maybe we had last year."
