Clemson football: Tigers have plenty of things to prove
By John Chancey
Will the real DJ Uiagalelei please stand up? 2020 or 2021?
DJ Uiagalelei had a bad 2021. Most people accept that now. A lot of people accepted that he wasn’t very good by the third or fourth game of the season. Still, there were still those faithful that wanted to believe that at some point, the light bulb would come on for DJU and he would be what we expected him to be.
It’s easy to understand why they held on. I was a believer in the offseason after 2020. I saw what everyone else saw that year. I saw DJ play very well for a true freshman. I saw DJ throw for more yards in a losing effort at Notre Dame than I ever saw Trevor Lawrence throw for in any game of his entire three season Clemson career.
I saw a completely different DJ last September against Georgia. I caught a little flack for questioning if DJ had the “it” factor after that one game. I hoped, like many other fans, that game was a fluke, or it was more on a offensive line that couldn’t pass block, but the QB I saw that night looked nothing like the guy who played in 2020.
Fast forward to today, and there are few who question how different 2021 DJ was from the season before, but still so many that hope an offseason and a new workout regimen & diet will turn him back into the 2020 DJ we thought we would see last year.
As I have absorbed all the comments we have seen from insiders and observers, I have “read the tea leaves” and I can sum it up like this: DJ will play better than he was last year because he’s in better shape, he’s refreshed, he’s taking more responsibility for being a leader and, perhaps most importantly, the players around him (specifically his offensive line) are better, but at the end of the day the DJ we saw in 2021 is much closer to the real DJ than what we saw in 2020.
Further, we’ve heard a lot of positives about Cade Klubnik, and it sounds like he has the potential to be a very good quarterback…eventually. It doesn’t sound like he is a better option right now.
I wrote earlier in the summer that Clemson‘s offense can still be much better than what we saw in 2021 even if DJ or Klubnik failed to significantly improve the quarterback play for the Tigers, so there is still reason for optimism. I just wouldn’t jump to conclusions that all the struggles are over until DJ proves otherwise.