Was Dave Doeren happy to knock Wayne Gallman out of the game?

There’s not a ton of interesting Tiger news out there at the moment so I’d like to concentrate some comments by NC State coach Dave Doeren in the wake of the Clemson-NC State game.

Note that these are my opinions and not necessarily the opinions of anyone else associated with this blog.

Here’s the clip with Doeren’s comments:

It’s a short snippet. In response to a question about whether NC State did the things they needed to do to win, he responded “Yeah we did, you know I mean we knocked their tailback out of the game. We had two goal line stands, 4 takeaways, didn’t give up explosive plays...”

That’s all fine to me except when he groups in knocking Wayne Gallman out of the game as something they needed to do to win, as if it was a goal to have achieved. It’s an odd thing for a person to say.

As everyone knows, Gallman was knocked out by a hard hit from Dravious Wright. It was an obvious concussion and Gallman can’t even remember getting off the field. Clemson thought it might have been targeting and submitted tape to the ACC, but the league felt differently. I’m not going to get into whether or not it was a a clean play or a dirty hit as it has been discussed on this website already (Gallman, for what it’s worth, felt it was dirty), but the point I’m trying to make is that regardless of whether the play was dirty or not. A person shouldn’t list an injury to an opposing player as part of the positive things they did in the game. That’s even more obvious of a faux pas when the play itself was, some argue, a dirty hit.

An NC State official’s reaction to these comments was the following, as relayed to Tigernet:

That’s all well and good but why wouldn’t he just say “Our defense played very physically” I think it’s very odd that a coach would, instead of praising the physicality of their players would instead boast about knocking a player out of the game. I can’t imagine Coach Swinney ever listing that as a positive, and Clemson has knocked plenty of players out of games. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we have done this before or maybe people do say things like this. It rubs me the wrong way, though. Saying valid things in a response to a question doesn’t really cure the fact that the first thing he said in response was that they took out our running back.

Is this an overreaction? Am I stretching here? Perhaps. We all have our biases. Fortunately, Gallman is expected to play. In this day and age though, we all realize that concussions are no joke.

In other news, Swinney showed up in the news for the right reasons. Former Clemson OC Chad Morris scored the biggest win of his tenure at SMU by upsetting Houston. Dabo was one of the first to reach out to him to congratulate him afterwards. Chad had some nice things to say about Dabo in response.

With a bye week, Dabo had some time to keep up with other happenings around the country. He had a talk with Purdue’s interim head coach, who was appreciative:

Coach Swinney has his critics but I feel like he must be a difficult person to dislike if you meet and talk to him in person.