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by WILL FOLKS
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One of the most highly scrutinized college football hires this past offseason was Clemson University head coach Dabo Swinney‘s decision to bring back Chad Morris as the program’s offensive coordinator.
“The name of the game is points,” Swinney noted in re-hiring Morris back in January. “The one thing I know about Chad, he knows how to score points.”
While that may have been true the last time Morris coached in Tigertown, it was decidedly not true last Saturday night (September 5, 2026) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
No. 23 Clemson opened its latest campaign in humiliating fashion, getting thrashed 51-10 by eleventh-ranked LSU. It was worst loss of Swinney’s coaching career and the fourth consecutive season-opening defeat for his once-proud program, which is still struggling to adapt to the new landscape of college football.
Morris’ offense was a case study in ineptitude, with LSU head coach Lane Kiffin calling out its “dysfunction.”
“I didn’t know they’d be that dysfunctional on offense,” Kiffin said after the game.
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Adding to the insults, Kiffin noted LSU’s offensive scout team scored more points against his defense in a simulated game than Clemson did at Tiger Stadium on Saturday.
“Our mock team scored more points against us than them,” Kiffin said.
Consider these first half numbers from Morris’ offense…
* One (1) first down
* Three (3) points
* Fifty-four (54) total yards
* Six (6) rushing yards
* Zero (0) third down conversions
Prior to embarking on an 8-play, 71-yard touchdown drive against LSU’s reserves late in the fourth quarter, Clemson managed an anemic 74 yards on its first twelve drives – a dismal 6.16 yards per drive average. Clemson quarterbacks Christopher Vizzina and Tait Reynolds were sacked four times and hurried another six times while LSU recorded eleven tackles for loss.
The clip that epitomized the evening for Clemson was sophomore left tackle Brayden Jacobs forgetting to block his man on a third down play…
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Bold blocking scheme there on a 3rd down pic.twitter.com/nUsNrm4kkL
— Football (@BostonConnr) September 6, 2026
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“I can’t even watch this Clemson offense on tape,” college football film analyst Landon Tengwall wrote on X. “It’s disgustingly bad.”
ESPN’s Bill Connelly was similarly brutal in his assessment of Clemson’s offensive performance.
“On Saturday night in Baton Rouge, Clemson brought no new offensive ideas to the table and executed old ideas horribly,” Connelly wrote. “The Tigers produced their first first down of the game with 10:19 left in the first quarter, then had to wait almost 30 full minutes for another one.”
Connelly called Morris’ hiring “lazy and reductive,” adding that Swinney “has never been further away from the right answers” in his bid to rebuild the Tigers into a national powerhouse.
Here’s the thing: as bad as Clemson’s office was, its defense under second-year coordinator Tom Allen was arguably worse. The Tigers surrendered 644 total yards – including 309 rushing yards – to Kiffin’s offense. It was the first time in more than a dozen years a Clemson team gave up more than 300 yards on the ground.
Swinney was surprisingly upbeat after the game, referring to the Tigers’ mistakes as “nothing we can’t correct” – blaming them on “alignment miscues,” “MAs (missed assignments)” and “footwork stuff.”
Is he right, though? Or is something far more fundamentally wrong with his football program?
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Swinney is just two years removed from a College Football Playoff (CFP) appearance and just three years removed from an unprecedented run of twelve straight seasons with at least ten wins. That run included four appearances in the national title game and championships in 2016 and 2018.
That history has given Swinney an incredibly long leash, but more than few Tiger fans were searching the internet this weekend wondering aloud what his buyout would be were Clemson to fire him without cause (it’s currently $57 million, by the way).
Clemson fans also haven’t failed to notice the descent of the program aligning neatly with the departure of former defensive coordinator Brent Venables – whom this media outlet repeatedly made clear was the “secret to (Swinney’s) success.”
Swinney was 29-19 (.604) prior to hiring Venables as his defensive coordinator in 2012 – and his teams are 37-17 (.685) since Venables departed to become Oklahoma’s head coach. Those are decent numbers, but during Venables’ ten years calling defenses at Clemson, Swinney’s teams went 121-18 (.870).
“(Venables) is the real reason Clemson’s program has reached its current level of success – not head coach Dabo Swinney,” I noted heading into the 2016 campaign, which saw the Tigers win the first of those two championships.
Not surprisingly, Venables has positioned his new program as a national powerhouse – showcasing the very sort of adaptive proficiency Clemson has failed to grasp.
It’s certainly up for debate whether all of the changes to college football over the past few years are good for the game. What’s not up for debate, though, is Clemson has failed to change with the game.
That failure took center stage last weekend in the “real” Death Valley.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
Will Folks is the founding editor of the news outlet you are currently reading. Prior to founding FITSNews, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and eight children.
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SOUND OFF…
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