Clawson says confidence was never there

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Coaches Chavis and Fulmer talk about the impressive 23-game winning streak against Kentucky. The 2008 game against Kentucky marks Phillip Fulmer's last game as head coach for the University of Tennessee football team. Watch »

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UT defensive coordinator, John Chavis, reflects on his career as a coach for the Vols. He talks about his coaching staff, the "keep it real" philosophy with players and what these last few days with the program mean. Watch »

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UT offensive coordinator, Dave Clawson, talks about the struggles with the offensive line this year and the quarterback issue -- all dating back to this Spring. Watch »

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Coach Fulmer talks about the Kentucky matchup and Coach Chavis talks about seeing UT's former offensive coordinator, Randy Sanders, again. Sanders is now the quarterback coach for the University of Kentucky. Watch »

Confidence and success quite often go hand in hand. For Tennessee's offense, there's been little of either all season long.

"I don't think I ever walked off the practice field saying, 'We're finally close to where we need to be,' " UT offensive coordinator Dave Clawson said Tuesday. "It was part personnel and part a new scheme and part a new coach. It was probably all those things. I don't think at any point as an offensive unit that we had confidence going into a game or even into a scrimmage."

Clawson will coach his 12th - and final game - with the Vols (4-7, 2-5 SEC) in Saturday's season finale against Kentucky (6-5, 2-5) in Neyland Stadium (TV: ESPN2, 6:30 p.m.).

And the offense that will take the field looks little like the wide-open, multiple-formation attack Clawson talked about 10 months ago when he was hired to replace David Cutcliffe.

As spring practice and fall camp wore on, confidence continued to wane. As the losses piled up during the regular season, UT's offense continued to become more and more basic, Clawson said.

"What does the offense look like now even compared to UCLA or UAB or the spring game?" he said. "If you're struggling and you're not doing well, it's always better to do less than do more. Probably we pared it down to a point where we're a lot more predictable than we'd like to be and a lot more one-dimensional than we'd like to be.

"When I took the job and the season started, this is not what I envisioned this offense looking like."

With one game left, UT's offense already looks like one of the worst in program history.

If UT fails to score at least 24 points Saturday, the Vols will have scored their fewest points since 1965, when they tallied 193 in 10 games.

Barring a monstrous game Saturday, the Vols are on pace for their worst passing output in nearly two decades, and without at least 140 rushing yards against the Wildcats, UT will finish with its lowest total since 1964.

Clawson and UT coach Phillip Fulmer pointed to several factors that played a role in UT's offensive struggles this season: a new system, injuries that limited practice time for major contributors during the spring, inconsistencies in every facet of the game, poor quarterback play and a lack of explosive plays.

"The change in systems was harder than I ever imagined it would be and that slowed things down considerably," Fulmer said before listing some of those reasons. "Even with all of that, we should have been better than we were offensively."

With little success - and almost no consistency - from spring practice through 11 regular season games, Clawson said players had a hard time buying into his system.

And he doesn't blame them.

"I have mirrors in my house," he said. "At what point did we have a great scrimmage or a great game that they'd say, 'Man, this offense is great?' We never, ever had that.

"We never had enough sustained success for them to really buy into it. I don't fault them for it. I thought they competed and worked hard. I thought they believed in what we were trying to do. It just never clicked."

That's not for a lack of pushing buttons.

In a 20-10 victory over Vanderbilt, the Vols played four different players at quarterback including wide receiver Gerald Jones and safety Eric Berry. All three scholarship quarterbacks have played this season, and none has played more than seven games.

"As the season wore on and we got in the position we did, I think we started trying new things just to try to get a spark," Clawson said. "You got to a point to where you couldn't just keeping saying, 'We're going to keep doing the same thing and think that it's going to get better.' "

With the coaching staff on the way out after Saturday's game, Clawson won't have the chance to turn things around next year.

"I've been through it before," Clawson said. "I've had other seasons like this. In all those cases, I've had an opportunity to try to make it better and in every case it has."

On Tuesday, Fulmer reiterated his belief that the current staff could rebound from this year's woes if given another year. He also said he was prepared for a change in philosophy with a new coordinator, even if it hadn't been Clawson.

"Whoever it was, it was going to be some change," Fulmer said. "We made some decisions that if we had it to do over again - and that's life - that you would do things differently. I'm not saying who we hired. If you go back and change, you'd certainly change how you did things."

Drew Edwards covers University of Tennessee football. He may be reached at 865-342-6274.

© 2008, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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