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Big props here to Kelly Bryant and Brandon Streeter
Sep 17, 2017, 3:44 PM
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Kelly Bryant hasn't just done well through three games. He's left the Clemson program on remarkably solid footing.
Everything in football these days starts and ends with the QB. Unless you're Alabama and can just recruit high-end-4 and 5-star talent 3-deep to every position (and we can't, however deep we are, we still have more than a few project-type players on our roster and we've only averaged 13th nationally in recruiting over the last 5 years, which leaves those ahead of us with some serious 'splaining to do) you have to have an elite QB.
Clemson now looks to be on their third straight elite QB. Tajh Boyd may not have been perfect or an NFL prospect, but he was an elite QB and Clemson started breaking scoreboards with him under center. Deshaun Watson continued the trend. And now Kelly Bryant has emerged...leaving Clemson with some serious young gunslingers in its stable who now have the luxury of being developed slowly as opposed to being thrown into the deep end, and hey, hope you can swim, son....
Now they get to practice, and watch, and learn. Without the unholy fishbowl pressure of being The Man squarely upon their shoulders. It means when it finally is their turn, their odds of having the comfort within the system and the relative maturity of being able to handle the pressure are dramatically increased. The longer you can hold a young QB, either in college or in the pro's, the better his chances get...as long as he's being tutored correctly.
Which brings us to Point #2...the tutoring. I said earlier that Kelly Bryant was going to be a huge referendum on QB coach Brandon Streeter because he was so raw. Anybody who saw Bryant play in Spring Games his first two years could attest the guy had miles to go. Deshaun Watson came to Clemson ready-made, polished, a 4-year starter in high school who had gotten the very best in high school coaching. Bryant in contrast spent three years in an option offense in Abbeville and then only transferred to a true passing offense at Wren as a senior; he was a mile behind Watson in terms of development when he arrived and was going to take some seriously tutelage to get near his potential. In the Shrine Bowl as a senior he threw three picks and looked lost; he looked lost when he arrived at Clemson...this guy who was dropping dimes all over the field last night simply didn't exist two years ago.
Watching what we're watching is a huge feather in Streeter's cap. It's a whole lot easier to look great when you've got a finished product in Deshaun Watson to work with; when you've got a raw-but-talented guy in Bryant and he still duly kills it when his time comes, that's great coaching going on. (Incidentally, it was also kinda hard to avoid noticing how good Cole Stoudt and Nick Schuessler also looked in their own appearances under Streeter. This is starting to look like a pattern there....)
So: props all around. Contrast that with what we have seen, say, right down I-26. Where they are on not their first but their fourth 4-star QB start in the last four years, the first three of whom did not finish the year as starters. (Connor Mitch, Lorenzo Nunez, Brandon McIlwain all fizzled, and all, incidentally, transferred.) And the same now seems to be happening to their savior-of-yesterweek, Jake Bentley...who again, got thrown to the wolves as a true frosh, and now three games into his true sophomore year is already generating talk about how he should be benched. None of those guys was remotely ready...but they got thrown in anyhow, and all but Bentley are failed, discarded, and gone. Food for thought....
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