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Rex Brown

Clemson’s Michael Hamlin pumps up the crowd during a game earlier this season at Memorial Stadium in Clemson. Hamlin and the Tiger defense have changed up their style of attack, playing more press-man coverage and trying to apply more pressure to opposing quarterbacks. The new plan was a success in the team’s win over Duke last Saturday, as Clemson held the Blue Devils to 85 passing yards.

CLEMSON — Clemson defensive coordinator Vic Koenning walked into the meeting room prior to last week’s game against Duke and laid down two sheets of paper in front of his defense backs and reportedly said, “This is the new plan.”

That plan was a press-man coverage scheme that directly came from the man currently in charge of the Clemson program. It’s a plan, at least in its first week, which worked with great results.

The Tigers (5-5, 3-4 ACC) held Duke to 168 yards, including 85 passing yards. The Blue Devils led the ACC in passing prior to Clemson’s 31-7 win.

“We are mixing it up a lot more,” Clemson interim head coach Dabo Swinney said. “I would say we were a much more pressure defense against Duke and that was the mindset we had going into that game. I felt like we could match up well with those guys.

“We have to pick our spots. We are a very good coverage team and have been. We are fourth in the nation in yards per pass so we are pretty good over there, but we have been a little bit more pressure as of late.”

It’s a scheme secondary guys have welcomed with open arms, though they do not oppose Koenning’s zone coverage scheme either. They just like the challenge of covering their man one-on-one.

“The guys up front get to go after the quarterback, the linebackers get to blitz and the defensive backs get to man up and see if we can cover the guy straight up,” Clemson safety Michael Hamlin said.

The press-man coverage the Tigers employed against Duke allows defenders to flush against the line of scrimmage, while trying to knock receivers off their routes before they can actually run them.

“We always believe we have the corners you need to play man-on-man, and we told Coach we want to play man-on-man and we told him we want to rush the passer,” defensive end Da’Quan Bowers said. “He called us. He said, ‘If ya’ll want it, you got it.’ He told us to go and rush the passer, and he was going to put them in man-on-man and was going to keep them back there all day.”

Despite perception, the Duke game wasn’t the first time Clemson used man press this year. In fact, Koenning said he used press coverage four times more against Florida State than he did Duke.

“I brought a house blitz 12 times against Florida State; I called it three times against Duke,” he said.

In all, Koenning says his scheme, which has the Tigers ranked nationally in three major categories this year, deploys 45 percent pressure and 25 percent of that is man coverage.

“You go back and look at last week’s game, the first 12 or 15 plays we were over 50 percent, but it still wasn’t over 25 percent man pressure,” he said. “There have been many years when I ran 60 percent man pressure, but since zone pressure has become more in vogue and became the thing to do against the five-out passing game, one guy gets rubbed off or one guy gets picked, sometimes zone pressure is a better way of doing it.”

And that’s probably what the Tigers will do at Virginia on Saturday against a Cavaliers team that ranks second in the ACC in passing yards per game (220.1).

“Their quarterback (Marc Verica) is a guy that is going to make plays and sits in the pocket and makes the correct reads,” Hamlin said. “He isn’t the type of guy that is going to run and make crazy passes and do anything stupid.”

And neither is Clemson’s defense. Koenning says whatever defensive scheme he uses Saturday will be the one that works.

“I only teach one kind of man coverage, but when a guy gets off the line three yards then you are off man. Sometimes guys back off more than we want them to,” he said. “We are usually three to five yards at the corner positions and at safety, and what happens with safeties is you don’t want to have to get up there because everybody is at the same level then, and you get rubbed.

“You want to have guys at different levels so you don’t get rubbed off. That’s just football.”