Bonnell: Clemson needs to tighten up its game versus North Carolina next week

Whoever said there is no such thing as a bad win was not at Williams-Brice Stadium Saturday.

The season-long pursuit of one of four spots in college football’s national championship playoff is a game of expectations. You can call that arbitrary and capricious. That’s because the standards a selection committee will use are arbitrary and capricious.

Those are the breaks when six or seven teams around the country can all make an argument they belong. Most of those teams haven’t played any of the others. Some don’t even have common opponents.

So like it or not, little things can mean a lot in selecting and seeding those teams. Which leads us to the little matter of Clemson beating South Carolina by only five points – 37-32 – Saturday.

Granted, this was a “rivalry game,” a matchup emotional enough that Tigers coach Dabo Swinney calls it a season unto itself. Unfortunately, it isn’t a season unto itself; the result becomes part of Clemson’s resume in the eyes of the committee, which will select the lucky four following next Saturday’s conference championship games.

Undoubtedly that committee is aware that South Carolina a week earlier lost at home to FCS member The Citadel by the score of 23-22. It is also aware that the Gamecocks finished this dreadful season 3-9, losing its last five games.

So in the hair-splitting that will be the discussions about seeding the lucky four, it just might come up that the Gamecocks scored more points on Clemson than they did on the Bulldogs. Or that South Carolina closed within three in the second half after trailing 14-0 and 28-10.

This isn’t me holding the 12-0 Tigers to such a high standard, it’s how the committee will perceive things in comparison to an Alabama or an undefeated Iowa. Last season illustrates the point: Florida State, the defending national champion, was undefeated. Yet, in the committee’s perception, it hadn’t won out impressively enough to avoid being seeded third among the four playoff teams.

So the Seminoles were sent cross-country to the Rose Bowl, where they were drilled in a national semifinal by Oregon.

Suffice it to say it would be wise for Clemson to look far more dominant when the Tigers play North Carolina at Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium. Also suffice it to say the words “ball security” will be shouted at the Tigers throughout practice in the coming days.

The Tigers fumbled three times against the Gamecocks and lost them all. That diminished the value of Clemson generating 515 yards of total offense Saturday. This isn’t a new problem, as Swinney noted post-game.

“We lost the turnover margin for the sixth time. When we win the turnover margin, we’re going to kill somebody,” Swinney said.

“You just can’t give up short fields. That’s what turnovers do and usually that gets you beat.”

Fortunately, Clemson isn’t your usual team. The Tigers have a quarterback (Deshaun Watson), a tailback (Wayne Gallman) and a tight end (Jordan Leggett) who are among the best in the country at their positions. They also have a group of wide receivers so deep they absorbed the loss of superstar Mike Williams to a neck injury the first game of the season.

So nothing that happened versus the Gamecocks was unsalvageable, just unsightly at a time when every little thing might be scrutinized.

No, that’s not fair. Doesn’t matter. That’s how it is.

This story was originally published November 28, 2015 at 6:25 PM with the headline "Bonnell: Clemson needs to tighten up its game versus North Carolina next week."