Clemson Football Participation: TE and WR

Once again we are returning to an annual series by taking a look at the snap totals for Clemson football. We've broken down each position by snap totals based on players and class. All of the snap data can be found on the Clemson website in this handy little game notes pdf. A quick reminder that all of this data is only for snaps on offense or defense. It does not account for any snaps played on special teams. Today we are going to take a look at the wide receivers and tight ends.

First we are going to look at the wide receivers. We've been spoiled over the past 3 seasons with some incredible talent at the position. Even after you look past Nuk and Sammy there was a lot of quality. Maybe not that elite level of talent those two provided, but it was still pretty good.  This year was definitely a step back in terms of that top end talent, but overall this is a pretty good group of WR and more importantly a young group of receivers.

As you can see in the class breakdown, almost 70% of the snaps taken at WR came from freshman or sophomores. The leader in this was Mike Williams with nearly 200 more snaps than any other player at the position. Even when he wasn't the target he still played a big role in the offense.

It would be interesting to see how this chart would have changed had Charone Peake been truly healthy. The redshirt junior only got 200 plus snaps this year when most of us were expecting/hoping he would be a big contributor to the offense. It was pretty obvious Peake wasn't fully healthy despite what the team was saying, and it cost him a lot of playing time. I think if he was healthy we would have seen Peake's appearances approaching that of Williams.

Of course a byproduct of Peake's health was the increase in snaps by Adam Humphries. Now I like Humphries a lot, he was a great find by Dabo, but I don't know that it is a great thing when he is getting 582 snaps on the season. That's a lot of time on the field when we have some other dynamic players that might have been even more productive with those snaps.

The scary part is that the snap totals for some of these guys like Hopper and Scott may not go up as much as we think. Given the incoming recruiting class some guys like Hopper will need to get their act together if they want to continue seeing the field of play.

For tight ends, can I just say everything stinks? The snap counts really reflect the lack of a dominant TE at Clemson right now. Yes, each of these guys has some potential, but they also have some critical flaws in their game. And let's just say I'm not optimistic they will get fixed. We will free up about 200 snaps, possible almost 450 of them depending on what Jay Jay McCullough decides to do with his life, and that means more bad blocking by just about everyone. I think I'm going to bring an orange cape to games and scream "Ole!" every time our TE whiffs on a block.