Wed. P.M. Update: Visits with other staffs, Auburn's OL personnel, Venables

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-- Brent Venables: What a hire by Dabo Swinney.

Yeah, we've touched on this recently. But with the game against Auburn looming, it makes sense to explore it even more.

Four years ago, Venables coached his first game at Clemson and it was a bewildering, almost scary experience for him. He left Oklahoma after 13 years to push himself out of his comfort zone, but as he stood on the field of the Georgia Dome preparing for Auburn he didn't feel very comfortable. Just the newness of it, almost as if he was in a foreign land after spending so much time in another part of the country as an important part of another family, if you will.

Well his body of work since that night, which featured a 26-19 victory over Gene Chizik's final Auburn team, is quite remarkable. He's a perfect fit here, meshing well with Dabo Swinney and establishing himself as an ace recruiter while churning out defenses that can withstand the loss of great players.

Where Kevin Steele sort of just tolerated Swinney, Venables embraces him and loves how he runs the program. If and when Venables does become a head coach, you know he's going to take a lot of the lessons he's learned here and apply them at that job. And it's quite ironic that Steele, who was not happy that Swinney brought in Chad Morris and his tempo offense five years ago, chose this offseason to leave LSU and join the man (Gus Malzahn) who taught Morris the HUNH offense.

The knock on Steele was a system that was allegedly too complicated to execute. And that's what makes the Venables hire so fascinating, because it's not like Venables brought in a defense that was vanilla. You often hear players talking about the complexity of it, the assignments that can change on a dime depending on what the offense does.

So just as Swinney went against the conventional grain in 2011 when he brought in Morris, you could argue he did the same thing a year later when he brought in Venables. Because when one coach is fired, it's quite common for his replacement to be the exact opposite philosophically. Swinney corrected, but he did not overcorrect. He still placed a premium on aggression when he searched for Steele's replacement, and that was a savvy move in hindsight.

Here's what Swinney said about Venables' scheme during the 2012 offseason:

"We're just not asking as much from some of those guys as far as checks and things like that. We are still going to have man coverage, but we are going to have some zone principles mixed in. They can use their eyes a little more, their instincts."

It hasn't all been perfect under Venables. As good as last year's defense was overall -- a remarkable achievement given what was gone from the 2014 defense -- it was still dysfunctional because of a habit of allowing big plays (none bigger than O.J. Howard's out-of-nowhere rampage in the final game).

So in that respect there's quite a bit for Venables to, uh, get fixed in 2016. But based on the vibes we've picked up consistently this offseason, there's a distinct confidence that the group will be more fundamentally sound on the back end and less prone to giving up the big plays.

Looking back at some of the analysis from the Venables hire four years ago brought some interesting nuggets. One was Venables saying he wanted his linebackers playing "more downhill" and making disruptive plays against the run. There were some struggles by the linebackers in his first year, but over the past three that position has put on a clinic at disrupting and dismantling opposing running games.