Dominated? Dominated?! -won handily? Yes, Dominated? No! The game was fairly close except for a few plays! I do hope we get Bama / Clemson 5, Sunshine is over rated. His greatness is based on beating an average Bama defense. The way people are reacting, you would think Clemson put up 600 yards of offense!
I agree...except I wouldn't say Sunshine is "overated" but he's probably "overhyped" at this point. It's just like what the media/fans did to Tua. I expect him to have a great year and probably get Clemson back to the playoffs unless he truly has a Soph. slump. Tua didn't and I doubt he will either, especially with their easy schedule.
The word dominated refers to the scoreboard at the end of the game. We lost by a dominating amount of points. Despite the context of the game, thats not what people remember. People remember Sunshine dropping dimes, receivers making a couple of our DBs look like high school Juniors, our Oline not protecting, and Tua throwing two Ints. No one remembers we moved the ball more yards than clemson, no one remembers the red zone inefficiency. The Score was 44-16. Thats a dominating win no matter the reasons or excuses for losing. Alabama doesn't lose to anyone by that amount.
I stand corrected. Clemson had more Total Yards than we did. They moved the ball 482 Yards to our 443.
Yes, scoreboard says "it wasn't close" but the game stats tell a different story. The game stats really show we played much better than the scoreboard indicated. We were leading in the second quarter and had three straight drives into Clemson territory in the 3rd quarter which resulted in zero points.
And I agree our coaches' minds were other places (CNS says so) and our players might have felt they couldn't be beat, which set the narrative to play so poorly, by our NC game standards. We would have beaten most teams even playing that distracted and poorly, but it's a credit to Clemson and Dabo that they were ready and got it done.
Give them credit, but it doesn't mean we suddenly are irrelevant.