The bigger deal about sign stealing, in my view, is this. First, Clemson isn't the only team that steals signs. The sign stealing is also not against the rules. I would think if, say, Combs notices that every times Team X signals sign Y he'll take that into account on his play calls. But, I think what the difference is here is that it seems pretty clear Clemson in reliant on the sign stealing more than maybe anyone wants to admit. If it's true that Clemson has devoted the amount of resources to sign stealing as has been reported, well.. that tells you something about how necessary they believe it to be for their success. It also leads to laziness, if you ask me. How are you getting better as an in game coach if you're doing little more than reading a cue card?
Stealing a sign should be the icing on the cake. Not the cake itself.
It boils down to how well Fields handles pressure as Clemson blitzes the hell out of him.
Edit: also, I agree with all three of your notes. I feel like the zone blitzes are designed to disguise some weaknesses in personnel. They have two true freshman starting on the DL and a walk-in at safety.
If we can execute I think we can get things rolling, again, just a matter of how we deal with that blitz.
Just throwing out there my thought, which I put out way before the game kicked off, that Clemson’s entire zone blitz scheme is likely intended to disguise pretty glaring personnel weaknesses on their D due to inconsistent recruiting in the back seven.
Hat tip to
@jwinslow for first mentioning their recruiting/player deficiencies.
So, they rely on stealing signs, a scheme that hides holes in their personnel, they have holes in their personnel because the money they funnel to players through the NewSpring Church only stretches so far, and they had four players randomly test positive for ostarine, from walkons to starters, indicating widespread use within the program and not an isolated incident.
I think they might be a bunch of cheating fucks.
I did notice during the game that Clemson was having quite a bit of success slanting their dline into our run plays to shut them down. I don’t attribute that to sign stealing or cheating in any way—perhaps we were tipping the direction of the run through formation or pre-snap motion or something. We eventually adjusted and it become less of an issue as the game went on, whether that was a scheme adjustment or the RBs just started looking for the cutback lane right away, or both.
Meyer also brought up an interesting point regarding the signal from the sideline for run plays usually being significantly shorter than the signals for pass plays due to pass plays requiring more information to be communicated—picking up on that would be a huge advantage for the D—knowing run versus pass on every play—and perfectly legal.
So, I am willing to concede there is gray area here. But still, fuck Clemson.
