Clemson's Venables Reflects on LSU Loss

After the 17-point defeat to LSU in the national championship game, Clemson defensive coordinator Brent Venables knows they lost to a better team.

If there's one member of the Clemson football program that has taken the team's loss to LSU on January 13 the hardest, it would most likely be defensive coordinator Brent Venables. 

In the loss to LSU, the Tigers gave up 628 total yards and six scores, which was a far cry from the average 264 yards and 11.5 points Venables' defense had allowed in 2019. LSU quarterback Joe Burrow capped a Heisman Trophy-winning season with 463-yard, five-touchdown performance in the biggest game of his career. 

Venables pointed to his defense's inability to stop LSU in crucial situations as the main reason for the loss.

"The execution, the precision that they force you to play with, you got to make plays," Venables said. "If you make mistakes when you play against really good explosive people, they'll make you pay. Mistakes as a play-caller, mistakes in leverage, mistakes situationally third and nineteen. We played great in the red zone all year and had our worst game. Just made too many critical errors, and again, they made us pay for some critical red zone mistakes. That's painful when again, our guys played really hard and we played really well in some spots, a lot of spots, but the explosive plays. I think we had five plays that we gave up on missed tackles and that was a season-high for explosive plays on missed tackles. But they out-executed us in some other spots and again, I'm stating the obvious in some of this, but it's very painful to get there and come up short."

In the ultra-competitive world of college football, Venables acknowledges how difficult it is to be in the position Clemson has been for the past five seasons, with the Tigers at least making an appearance in the national championship game four out of the last five seasons. 

"Those opportunities, it may never happen again. That's the reality," Venables said. "You never take that for granted, that's first and foremost. How incredibly hard and fortunate you have to be to get there. And it felt like you're good enough, you certainly weren't good enough on that night, the better team won. But I'm super proud of our guys and our football team. Coached/played in plenty of games where you're not as proud as you'd like to be. Very, very proud of our guys for the effort that they put into it."

Beyond mat drills early on in the spring, Venables has not felt a need to bring up the loss to the 2020 team. 

"Again, that was last year. This is a new team," Venables said. "A lot of those players are gone. We'll never play here again. You start your journey completely over like everything, both good and bad. You try to learn from your experiences and you try to share in some of those experiences with maybe guys that didn't play, but I thought our guys were very well prepared. 

"I thought they had a great mindset, and again, they played with incredible passion and effort and toughness, were physical, and again, just got beat by a better team. We beat ourselves up enough. I know us as coaches probably do, but when you experience it, there's nothing to have to reinforce."