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After Clemson's Sugar Bowl meltdown last January, we pushed back on the notion that the beatdown was the product of a bad night of defense alone.

While it's undoubtedly true that allowing touchdowns on five consecutive possessions is going to be the main story when you lose by three touchdowns and allow 49 points, in our mind the offense sent some distressing signs by its inability to keep up in a high-scoring game which happened to be the last for Trevor Lawrence, Travis Etienne, Amari Rodgers and Cornell Powell.

We thought that game brought a reckoning not just for a defense that was caught off-guard by pre-snap tactics and physically overwhelmed, but also for an offense that was dominated at the point of attack and looked rather stale schematically.