Clemson Football: Offensive Grades, Report Card vs. UNC

The Clemson football team escaped Chapel Hill with a 21-20 win over North Carolina. Here are our offensive grades from the victory.

This likely won’t be a game that many Clemson football players enjoy turning on the film to watch.

The Tigers came into Chapel Hill as a 26.5-point favorite and didn’t even muster that many points, narrowly defeating the UNC Tar Heels by a score of 21-20.

As we continue to look back at the game, here’s our offensive grades and report card from the match up.

Offensive Report Card:

Anybody who has kept up with Clemson football this season knows that the offense hasn’t been clicking on all cylinders.

That was on full display Saturday afternoon.

From a mixture of questionable play-calling, poor performance from the offensive line, an untimely turnover and some errant pass attempts, the offense was all out of sorts. There were a few times that the unit looked on track, especially on the two touchdown drives in the first half. Trevor Lawrence made some plays with both his legs and arm to keep those drives alive and Tee Higgins came up with huge catches.

Unfortunately for the unit, every time it seemed that they were taking a step forward, something would happen that came as a setback. Whether it was Travis Etienne’s fumble at a point where the Tigers had a chance to grab momentum early, Trevor Lawrence underthrowing or overthrowing his intended targets (which cost the Tigers at least one touchdown), or the offensive line not opening up holes in the running game and making Lawrence scramble for his life, things just didn’t click.

Grade: D+

The unit did enough to come away with the win, including scoring the game-winning touchdown on a 38-yard pass from Lawrence to Higgins, so they didn’t fail. But, it wasn’t pretty and there’s a lot to fix going forward. Perhaps a D+ grade is too harsh, but when you think about this offense’s potential, it certainly was a disappointing outing Saturday afternoon.