Clemson football: QB depth issue will not be solved until 2022

The Clemson football backup quarterback situation is far from settled which is unsettling for most Tiger fans and won’t be solved until 2022.

Looking at the current Clemson football roster makes a lot of fans extremely nervous when they look at the quarterbacks on the roster. Currently, the Tigers have five gunslingers listed on the roster, though that is highly deceptive.

Two of them, Bubba Chandler and Will Taylor, may never step foot on campus, and Taisun Phommachanh was injured in the last play of the spring game a few months ago and is going to miss the start of the season.

That leaves starter DJ Uiagalelei and former walk-on, Hunter Helms, as the only two options. Should Uiagalelei get hurt in 2021, the Tigers will be in a world of trouble and head Dabo Swinney’s refusal to recruit the transfer portal for a viable backup quarterback could come back to haunt the Tigers.

Clemson football coaches have been ignoring the obvious

In the latest MLB mock draft, both Chandler and Taylor or seen as the first-round draft picks. Taylor has been mocked 16th overall to the Miami Marlins and Chandler was mocked 24th overall to the Atlanta Braves (that will excite a large portion of the Clemson football fan base).

If those two do in fact end up being taken in the first round of the Major League Baseball draft and they choose to take the millions of dollars that come along with that, they will never step foot on campus as anything more than a fan.

Given how badly the Athletics got burned by Kyler Murray a few years ago, MLB teams are no longer going to pay elite draft picks and then allow them to go play college football.

This isn’t new news either. Both Bubba Chandler and Will Taylor have been mocked in the MLB first round for months, which means Dabo is purposely ignoring the fact that they have no depth at quarterback.

While many believe Swinney walks on water, he has his faults and stubbornness seems to be one of them when it comes to evolving with the game of college football.

We get it, Coach Swinney will say the obligatory “we can win with any quarterback on our roster” – the problem is it was not true when he said it in 2014 when he chose Cole Stoudt over Deshaun Watson, it was not true when he said it in 2017 about Kelly Bryant over Zerrick Cooper or Hunter Johnson and it will not be true in 2021 if something happens to DJ.

The quarterback depth is a problem and one that more than likely will not be solved until Cade Klubnik arrives with the class of 2022.