Morris Era Begins with Rocky Start as Tigers Defeat Troy

Besides our lack of physicallity, I think the thing that disappointed me the most was the shitty tackling. The biggest positives I take away from this game are our coaches abilities to make halftime adjustments and the play of our freshmen and improvement of our WRs.

In regards to the lack of physical play from the lines, I’m not saying coaching and preparation wasn’t a problem for this game, but don’t these guys have any pride in themselves as individuals or in their school? How long do you let a guy push you around before you stand up and say “Hey, I’m tired of this guy making me look bad and I’m going to push him back.” Also, if I’m playing for Clemson University and I see that chode of a head coach for Troy on the sideline with that stupid fucking smirk on his face, I’m going to do everything in my power to wipe it off. You’re representing Clemson University. You’re playing in Death Valley. That means something. And if you don’t understand that, then you’re in the wrong place.

So while coaching and conditioning may be a problem, I think maybe the bigger problem is that we recruited guys with no pride.

The couple times we got beat bad off the edge I’m not too surprised, that DE of theirs is a good player and considering I thought Price played about as well as I thought he was capable. But the inability of our gaurds to move their smaller tackles AT ALL was pathetic. Thank God Ellington is great at hitting through a tiny seam at speed, or we wouldn’t be able to run the ball.

I’m guessing you’ve never actually been a strength coach, have you B? This is going to be a long post since this is sort of up my alley.

Strength is strength, and it’s always functional with regards to itself. “Functional strength” is a buzzword concocted by hucksters selling sports-specific gimmicks and has no place in a high level football team’s physical preparation program. Ever seen the “Jammer”? Attempting to mimic sporting movements in the weight room with added resistance demonstrates thorough ignorance of the preparation process and the biomechanical circumstances of sport.

I know you’re super keen on trashing Batson, since you do it pretty frequently, but can you really explain or even describe the methods he’s using to prepare athletes? The principles he’s using are the same as the ones being used across the nation at top 25 football programs and NFL teams, including the Patriots, Packers, Ohio State, etc. I know specifically what he’s doing and I can tell you that it’s industry standard. As a matter of fact, if you talk to any of the preparation coaches from other schools, they all hold Batson in high regard and the only place you ever see him getting trashed is on Clemson blogs by posters who haven’t been in a competitive weight room since they were in high school.

Physical preparation for football boils down to two basic elements: general physical preparation (GPP) and specific physical preparation (SPP). GPP is developed in the weight room and track SPP is developed on the practice field where those general capacities are transferred (or not) into specific ends via specific means (in this case, playing football). If a guard is soft and getting pushed around, then the amount of strength he possesses is only tangentially relevant. If a car has 500 hp but the driver never gets out of first gear, you wouldn’t say that the car is slow. You would say that the car wasn’t being driven correctly and you definitely wouldn’t blame the guy who built the engine.

Specific capacities aren’t developed in the weight room and SHOULDN’T be developed in the weight room. There really is an over-emphasis by the lay population on the importance of the physical preparation coach. In football, which is largely dependent on body mass and leverages, the physical preparation coach’s primary job is to make sure that his athletes carry the requisite amount of body mass in a manner that impacts their ability to perform the least. Their job is to make sure that athletes are big enough, strong enough, fast enough, and mobile enough for sport and EVERYTHING else is dependent on specific positional coaching making those general abilities transfer into sporting form. A perfect example of this is Alabama. They bring in elite athletes via recruiting who already possess every general attribute necessary to be successful at that level and make them better athletes by coaching them up at their position. Alabama’s strength coach is a mouth breathing meathead who (from a friend who has spent more than a little bit of time in the weight room at Tuscaloosa) possess no knowledge or expertise beyond what you could find in the average gym rat at your local Gold’s Gym. The fact that their preparation coach contributes little to nothing to the capacity of the athletes to perform on a national level should tell you something about the importance of general physical preparation vs. specific preparation when it comes to actual on field ability.

That being said, you can’t expect 10 years of Brad Scott tissue softness to dissipate entirely after a single off season. Give Caldwell some time, I’m confident that he’ll harden those boys up.

Really? Louie Simmons philosophy is based on gaining bodyweight and absolute strength with little regard for mobility, relative strength, or explosiveness? Have you ever BEEN to Westside Barbell? Here’s a clue: I have. Louie Simmons built his entire system around making athletes explosive. He devotes half of every training week to it. The vast majority of the RE method exercises that he utilizes are devoted solely to improving and maintaining mobility, hence the advent of the oscillating barbell (bamboo bar), clubbells, grappler, landmine, etc. I watched an interview with Simmons just the other day where he expicitly said that weight should only be gained as a means for optimizing leverages (ie if an athelete is too skinny for their sport) and that weight gain for any other reason detracts from power production and should be avoided. Your arguments are invalid because you’re not even getting close to getting your facts straight.

Secondly, you’re putting all of the credit (or blame) for other teams squarely on the S&C staff. Never mind that Florida State finally retired the increasingly senile and out of touch Bobby Bowden or that Alabama replaced Mike Shula (who, by the way, still managed to have a 10-2 season during his 4 year tenure with an inferior S&C staff) with Nick Saban, who happens to win every where he goes.

Thirdly, your definition of “functional” strength encompasses all of the means that Batson commonly uses. Squats, front squats, trap-bar deadlifts, sled pushes, box squats, board presses, kettlebell movements, jumps, throws, and olympic pulls ALL qualify under your definition of “functional movements”. As a matter of fact, his powerlifting background means that he has a background in “functional movements”, as powerlifters compete in the squat, bench press, and deadlift exclusively. I get the impression that you are confusing bodybuilding and powerlifting, since the motor abilities developed by the powerlifts and the olympic lifts are nearly identical and both require the ability to produce and transfer force by and through the body as a singular unit. I’ve coached multiple powerlifting athletes to an elite level, including a 198 lb junior (23 and under lifter) squatting over 600 in a belt and singlet and a female athlete with a top 10 all-time squat in her weight class. I have more than a little experience with those three lifts and I can assure you, the implication you keep making about muscles working in isolation is entirely irrelevant to the powerlifts.

Funny you draw the Batson=Westside, Cochran=Olympic lifting dichotomy, talk up Cochran as being superior at developing “functional strength”, and then trash on Batson because he uses the bench press as a means for developing upper body strength in his athletes. It’s funny because it’s entirely contrary to reality. ESPN did a special on Cochran and his weight room during the preseason in 2010 and they spent the entire time filming Cochran screaming at kids bench pressing and sitting on Hammer Strength machines. I have a friend who worked in that weight room for a while under Cochran and he will tell you the same.

Ultimately, it’s ironic that you complain about the injury rate under Batson and then try to make the case for a system based on the Olympic lifts and the Hatch system. The olympic lifts take years to master with hands on, personal attention and for that reason aren’t exactly practical to implement safely in a weight room where you have 100+ athletes to deal with. Once again, this isn’t from something I read online, this is from my actual experience teaching athletes the olympic lifts. I work with them one-on-one, so I can use them. If I had an entire team to oversee, it wouldn’t be happening.

Finally, I’d like to see you cite an actual source for this:

“Olympic lifters have higher verticals on average than football or basketball athletes.”

Dude,

What’s with people booing at half-time? I understand we were down by 3, but give ‘em a break. It’s supposed to be home field advantage at Death Valley, not “let’s encourage the visiting team.”

I’m not asking people to applaud crappy, jittery, or sloppy play, but give a new QB, a new OC, and a new offensive scheme a chance people.

and you can’t come out with that kind of performance despite the growing pains that we are going through butin the end they did pull this one out with a score that is actually higher than was predicted by most. That being said, this tyoe of effort will not cut it against Auburn, FS, and Va tech. O-line and D-line needs their heads smashed together and get right, now. I was encoraged to see Tajh settel in a bit, once he had time to throw the ball, and the freshmen are the real deal. Dr. B if everything you say is true, then what chance does out O-line have if they have a bad foundation to being with? What can Caldwell do when they aren’t even trained right by the time he gets them?

Do yall really think this team has a lot of upward mobility at this point? Auburn is going to be a total crapshoot, we saw them fail to move to dominate a team similar to Troy today. But we are absolutely gonna get our clocks cleaned against FSU and Va Tech, just wait for it. Good things being said about this team will be real easy to find over the next 2 weeks but after that I think we’re fucked.

1) This past summer there were several football weightroom training videos posted in a Tiger football article. I was shocked at the bad form (cheating) on every lift. For example, when guys were doing standing, alternate dumbell curls, they were swinging their arms up (from behind their butts) and arching their backs as the dumbell rose in front of their hips. I’m no expert, but to me that looked like total fucking cheating and a big waste of time, if not possibly harmful to their backs. They were just swinging the dumbells with their bodies, not curling them with their biceps. If I had done shit like that, my coach would have kicked my ass. At the time I commented on T-Net that it looked like they were doing back exercises because swinging weights doesn’t do much for your biceps. Or for example, when the players were bench-pressing, they were cheating by bouncing the bar off their chests. Maybe I’m just old school and I don’t know shit, but it seems to me that if you need to hold onto the football or wrestle it away from the other guy at the bottom of the scrum, you should work on your biceps rather than your swinging-arching technique. And if you need to push a guy away (as in blocking), you should work on your pecs rather than working on the trampoline-elasticity of your rib cage. Maybe I’m just old school, but it looked to me like Batson wasn’t enforcing proper technique and therefore wasn’t doing his job well. Maybe one of the experts here can explain the benefit of bouncing weights off your chest, instead of pressing the weights.

2) Depending on how you lift (high-weight/low-rep, low-weight/high-rep, etc.) you can target your weight training for strength, bulk, endurance, and/or explosiveness. I don’t know exactly what Batson’s program looks like, but I know what the results on the field have looked like— and it hasn’t been good. Considering the talent that Clemson brings in, and considering how we get manhandled by similarly-sized, lower-rated guys (like those from Troy, not Bama), I’d say that whatever Batson is doing, isn’t working. But it could be that the position coaching is so poor that it’s overcoming the S&C, or that the attitudes are so piss poor that they guys don’t work hard and don’t mind gettting their assess whupped.

3) The clean & jerk, snatch, & dead lift seem to have no resemlance to any motion employed when playing football, so they shouldn’t be wasting their time on that macho competition-weightlifting stuff. But I think Batson has the players spending a lot of time on those competition weightlifting lifts. Didn’t Jay Kay Jay blow out his back and prematurely end his football career by doing dead lift or something similarly useless?

4) Too many of our players are fat, and therefore not as nimble or as cariovascurly fit as they could be. Not sure who’s in charge of that, but it sucks.

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