Clemson Football: Five Keys to victory against the Florida Atlantic Owls
By John Chancey
Clemson Football will play a night game against a team from Florida that was once coached by Willie Taggart. It just isn’t the team most people expected.
Here are the five keys to victory over the Florida Atlantic Owls when the Tigers kickoff at 8:15 PM on Saturday at Death Valley.
Stop the bleeding on offense
Mistakes on offense have been costly. Before Labor Day, Clemson had never lost a game in the Dabo Swinney era when they had 200 yards passing and 200 yards rushing.
It was the missed field goals, lost fumbles, and early slides on 4th down that cost them against Duke, and similar errors led the Tigers to trail the Charleston Southern Buccaneers by a touchdown in the second quarter on Saturday.
No such mistakes occurred in the second half against CSU, and Clemson rolled to a 66-17 victory.
I’m not going to say if this team is mistake-free that they can beat anyone on their schedule, but I do believe they can defeat Florida Atlantic if they can avoid the errors that have plagued them thus far this season.
Florida Atlantic hired Tom Herman (formerly at Texas and Houston) as their head coach to replace Taggart. They brought in Casey Thompson (formerly at Nebraska and Texas) as the quarterback. Some were considering them to be a contender in the American Athletic Conference in their first season. Thus far, they haven’t jumped off the page at anyone.