Garrett Riley is tasked with improving Clemson’s offense, and the Tigers’ first-year coordinator believes the best way to do that is by keeping things simple.

With the Tigers nearing the end of the first week of spring practices, coaches and players have started detailing the differences in Riley’s offense and what Clemson previously ran under former coordinators Brandon Streeter and Tony Elliott. One of the most notable contrasts is the thickness of the playbook.

Quarterback Cade Klubnik recalled there being as many as 80 plays on the call sheet for one game last season. Klubnik said he expects Clemson to carry less than half of that into games on Riley’s watch.

With the offense in the installation phase and personnel evaluations in the infancy stage, Riley said it’s too early to know exactly what the call sheet will look like. But he’s already made one guarantee.

“It’s not 80,” Riley said. “Just whatever we feel like we need to carry. But for us and what we do, less is more. We’ll just kind of see where we’re at and what we feel like we need to carry. But if we can trim it, we’re going to trim it.”

That’s not the only simplification coming.

Clemson’s receivers have spent previous years learning different positions and switching sides of the field based on formations. In Riley’s offense, though, the wideouts will be doing a different kind of cross training where they stay put and learn the routes on each side of a given play. 

“When you get into game planning and things like that, you can put guys wherever you want them,” Clemson coach Dabo Swinney said. “But as a base rule, those guys, they don’t switch sides, so they cross-train naturally. I like that because the ball gets distributed differently, too. So that X (receiver), on the next play, he’s a Z. And that Z on the next play is an X because the ball is on the left hash, right hash or whatever. And then your slots make the adjustments.”

Riley said his reason for doing that is to get his receivers comfortable being in the same spot, which theoretically leads to more confident and consistent play on the outside through repetition.

“If (the receiver) is on the left side, he can truly master catching the ball over his (right) shoulder,” Riley said. “You get a guy on the right side all day long, he gets to become where he’s a master at catching the ball over his (left) shoulder. Things like that where they just do it over and over again. They’re not flipping all the time and getting used to doing a million different things, so there’s some comfort level with just kind of being in the same spot a lot.”

It can also help the offense operate faster by getting the next play off quicker, though Riley said he’s more interested in dictating tempo rather than snapping the ball within a certain amount of seconds.

“If you just play fast all the time, that may play into the hands of some people,” he said.

Riley’s offense doesn’t want to overcomplicate things, though. And his new players are on board with that approach.

“It only takes one play to score,” receiver Antonio Williams said. “So if you can score in one play, it’s better than scoring in five.”

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