“Just a few plays away”

The Mental Reset

The Tigers are hanging off a cliff right now, and a loss to the Tar Heels on Saturday could be the final straw. Cade Klubnik stepped to the podium today and drove home one central theme for his team: mental toughness. That, he said, is what the Tigers need if they want to salvage the rest of this season.

Clemson hasn’t been great coming off a bye week in recent years, and this time they can’t afford another sluggish start. If they come out flat Saturday, it could mean an early exit for some starters who have been struggling through the first half of the season.

What made Cade Klubnik special last year was how the game slowed down for him. He was making his reads, scanning the field, and making the right decisions. But now, just a few weeks into 2025, it feels like all the momentum he built has disappeared.

I’ve already discussed what that might be a product of in the past, so I won’t hammer that in again here. What I will hammer in is what it’s going to take to get Cade — and his team — back on track.

To start with, they’ve got to start hitting the layups. This offense has had open receivers downfield and opportunities to take advantage of weaker teams, but they just haven’t capitalized. Clemson has made offense look difficult all year, in a season where they were projected to have one of the top units in the country.

Cade echoed the “just a few plays away” sentiment that Dabo Swinney has repeated often this year. I understand fans are tired of hearing it, but truthfully, before the Syracuse game, they really were just a few plays off. The issue is, great teams make those plays — as we’ve seen Clemson teams do in the past.

That 2016 team, for example, felt at times like it was just a few plays away from missing the playoff. But they made those plays. They found a way. Unlike this 2025 team — a group that was supposed to be one of the best Clemson has fielded in recent memory.

For the team’s sake — and his own — I’d bet Dabo is doing everything he can right now to get this group past the “few plays” that continue to haunt them.