Parting ways with Thomas Austin and Lemanski Hall should bring better alignment to Clemson Football

Clemson Football began seeing exits this week from players leaving early for the NFL and entering the transfer portal. Thursday, it was coaches leaving the staff.

The school announced that Offensive Line Coach Thomas Austin and Defensive Ends Coach Lemanski Hall would not be returning for the 2024 season.

It has been speculated for a few months that changes would likely happen this off-season. Now that these two have been announced, we can see that it is likely about alignment on both sides of the staff.

The biggest problem this season on the offensive line appeared to be the change in blocking strategy to accommodate Garrett Riley’s offense. Riley utilized much more pulling on the line than was previously used under either Tony Elliott or Brandon Streeter.

When the staff elected to remove the pulling from the playbook starting with the Notre Dame game, there was a considerable improvement offensively.

That said, pulling is not a new, unusual, or complicated strategy to employ. There really is no reason why they shouldn’t have been able to implement Riley’s scheme.

I suspect the next hire for the offensive line will have the purpose of training the players how to properly run the blocking schemes required for Riley’s offense.

There have been many people critical of Hall over the years, usually about recruiting and development of highly-rated prospects like Xavier Thomas, KJ Henry and Myles Murphy. That said, I thought the defensive ends were a bright spot for the defense this season, particularly the performance of freshman TJ Parker.

This statement below was released today, and while it doesn’t involve specifics, it does indicate that this was a mutual decision.

Maybe that wording is just framing, but one thing that could be in play was the change two seasons ago when Nick Eason succeeded Todd Bates as Defensive Line Coach.

The changes to the Clemson Football staff could be as much about alignment as performance

This afternoon on Clemson radio William Qualkinbush speculated that Hall’s replacement on staff might not be a defensive ends coach, but perhaps a different title.

This is pure speculation on my part, but if Eason and Hall equated to “too many cooks in the kitchen”, this could account for both Hall wanting a new opportunity and Clemson wanting to make changes.

I’m sure as time goes by, we will learn more details about these changes, but on the surface they appear to be about finding the right alignment between the members of the staff as much as an evaluation of performance.