Clemson Football has begun its journey toward the Gator Bowl, and a couple of new faces have joined for the ride.
Head coach Dabo Swinney hired two new on-the-field coaches for the 2024 season, and they are already on the practice fields working with their groups.
Matt Luke will coach the offensive line and Chris Rumph rejoins the staff to coach the defensive ends.
Rumph coached at Clemson from 2006 to 2010. After that, he coached at Alabama, Texas, Florida, and Tennessee before spending a few years in the NFL.
Rumph made headlines on Twitter when the press observed his first practice with the team.
Clemson DE Coach Chris Rumph bowl prep 2023 😤😤 pic.twitter.com/Tlef1W1si5
— Clemson Highlights (@ClemsonRT) December 13, 2023
Fans have given this clip, as well as a handful of others that have made the rounds, a universal thumbs up, and it isn’t hard to figure out why.
Rumph is bringing an intensity that we haven’t seen in great abundance over the past few seasons.
We don’t get to see the staff in action very often. Much of the work this team does isn’t open for public consumption, for obvious reasons. The reality is that we don’t know how intense practices and meetings are behind closed doors.
We hear from insiders that Swinney may have chewed out some people, or that one practice or another is high energy, but we rarely see it with our own eyes.
What we do see with our own eyes are the games, and while things often look fine when the team is winning, there have been a few consistent themes when they are losing.
One of those themes has been a lack of toughness and intensity.
The addition of Nick Eason has been viewed as a positive for a few reasons. One of them is that he is a naturally intense person. You can see it in every interaction, even when he is relaxed and joking around.
This is something we also see from Swinney. He may not be keyed up, but he usually still exhibits his passion for the game and the program.
We can’t say the same about every coach who has been a part of this program over the past few years. That doesn’t mean they aren’t good coaches, but when a lack of toughness is a consistent theme when the team gets their heads handed to them by teams they should be beating, a lack of toughness and intensity from the coaches stands out.
We can see that Rumph is bringing some of that old-school toughness, and most accounts say Luke brings intensity to his mentorship of his players as well.
They only have a few weeks to work with the team before the Gator Bowl, but if we see a team playing with a new level of intensity, we know one of the reasons why.