Clemson's Kyle Richardson says Sunday sunrise, sermon gave him fresh perspective

Kyle Richardson said he couldn’t wait to get back to work this week.

by David Hood - Senior Writer - Tue Nov 08 08:00:05 GMT-04:00 2022

CLEMSON – Kyle Richardson didn’t get much sleep Saturday night into Sunday morning, and he wondered if the sun was still going to come up after the Tigers had taken a 35-14 beating at the hands of Notre Dame. But the sun came up, and a sermon helped brighten his mood.

Richardson, Clemson’s tight ends coach and passing game coordinator, told the media Monday that the team didn’t get home until around 4 a.m. Sunday morning. In a sour mood after what happened in South Bend, Richardson wondered what a new day would bring.

It brought a fresh perspective, and he shared that fresh perspective with his tight ends.

“It was a little cloudy because there was a little bit of rain dropping, and there for a minute I thought maybe it wasn't going to come up, but it did,” Richardson said of the sun. “And when it came up, I got my butt up and went to church and the preacher still preached. That was crazy because I was actually worried he wasn't going to preach, being down on the boys.

“But he preached and his sermon was on static. And the static is a lot of noise and it's where a lot of outside noise comes in and tries to affect your season and what the truth is, which I thought was very ironic to the situation we were in, and are still in. So yeah, I mean after I got done with that, I sent a text out to the tight ends and just told them that I loved them, told them that I was proud of them because you can say what you want, but that entire offense kept fighting the entire time and we finished on a high note and that's something to be super positive about going into this week. And I wanted to make sure they understood that.”

Richardson said he couldn’t wait to get back to work.

“I was ready to fix things on Sunday. And then we turn around and we go to practice on Monday and we start a brand new week because the biggest game of the year is this week. It's like that every week,” Richardson said. “So I'm not going to get on the negative train, I'm not going to get caught up in that narrative, and our players aren't either. And that's our job as coaches too, to make sure our players understand the big picture.

“And I've been here for seven years and I've walked in this building on a Sunday after a devastating loss to Pittsburgh and you think the season is over, just to turn around and go win a national championship about a month and a half later. I've walked in this building with a devastating loss to Syracuse and it's over, just to go to the playoff two months later. So nowhere in our building does it say we have to have the No. 1-rated offense in the country. That's not a goal. Nowhere in the building does it say we have to go undefeated. It's not a goal.

“And when I walked back in the building on Sunday, all our goals were still right in front of us. Everything is still right in front of us. And that's my mindset. And when I walk out of that tight end room today, that's going to be the mindset of the tight ends. And they already know it's my mindset because they heard that from me first thing Sunday morning when I woke up. We're just going back to work and that's what we got to do offensively.”

Richardson said there is no doubt that the offense is struggling.

“We're in a rut and nobody's sitting here trying to disagree with that,” he said. “We've got to play better, we've got to coach better. We've got to put kids in better situations and account for everything that comes with that. But all we can do is go back to work and make sure that they're confident in what we're doing, and I know they are.

“But then the flip side of it is, we're not patting on the back telling them how great they are either, as an offense and as a tight end group. They're accountable too for their play. Just like I'm accountable for my coaching and they're accountable for their play. So, when they come in today, I just want to make sure they know, hey, we got everything in front of us that we have said from day one, but we got to go back to work. We have to get better. We have to treat this Monday like we treated the Monday after we beat NC State and Wake Forest, who was ranked at that time.

"We're going to go fix some things that were wrong in the game and then from there, we're not going to let this game beat us twice. And that's the mindset that we have to have.”