Atlanta, Ga. — For an LSU team that asked so much of its defense all season, Monday night proved to be just too tall a task.
Staying on the field for 100 plays, the Tiger defense could not protect a 24-13 fourth quarter lead and Clemson kicker Chandler Catanzaro split the uprights on a 37-yard field goal as time expired to give Clemson a 25-24 win in the Georgia Dome.
“With an opponent who snapped the ball about 50 times more than our offense, they has to kick a last minute field goal to beat us,” said LSU coach Les Miles. “That defense played their butt off.”
Clemson quarterback Tajh Boyd feasted on a worn down LSU secondary, amassing 346 passing yards and two touchdowns while absorbing vicious hits from every angle in the pocket.
Junior linebacker and team MVP Kevin Minter paced the Tiger defense with 19 tackles, one off his season best, and a sack.
“There’s a reason why Tajh Boyd is an All-American,” Minter said. “We hit him pretty hard, we came after him and brought the heat. I can’t say enough about the guy.”
Suffering only its third bowl loss in Miles’ eight year tenure, LSU came firing out of the gates as junior defensive end Barkevious Mingo forced a Sammy Watkins fumble on the second play of the game that was recovered by safety Craig Loston.
Two plays and 24 seconds later, LSU jumped ahead as freshman running back Jeremy Hill rumbled 17 yards to paydirt to put the Tigers up 7-0 after only 55 seconds of action.
On the ensuing drive, Clemson pieced together a methodical 11 play, 75 yard march down the field that was capped off when Boyd dove for the goal line to knot the score at seven.
Boyd mixed runs of his own with sharp passes to wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins, who hauled in 13 catches for 191 yards and two scores.
“[Hopkins] may be as good a receiver as we’ve ever played against,” said LSU defensive coordinator John Chavis. “He has great ability and he’s done a really good job of being productive.”
After both teams exchanged punts on the next four series, LSU broke ahead with an eight play drive, capitulated by a perfectly thrown fade route from junior quarterback Zach Mettenberger to sophomore wide out Jarvis Landry in the corner of the endzone.
Mettenberger, who finished with only 120 yards through the air and that one score, lamented the inability of the offense to find a consistent rhythm.
“It was tough just trying to call a play here, play there,” Mettneberger said. “It’s just tough. You can’t get your system going.”
LSU stayed in control until the midway mark of the second quarter, when Boyd and the Clemson offense orchestrated an eight play drive that ended with Hopkins making a sliding catch in the endzone to pull the Tigers within one.
After junior defensive tackle Bennie Logan swatted away Catanzaro’s extra point attempt, both defenses kept both offenses off the scoreboard and LSU took a slim 14-13 lead into the locker room.
And right out of the locker room, it was again the freshman Hill who provided the spark.
The Redemptorist product scampered 57 yards to the endzone on the first play from scrimmage in the second half to ignite a meager LSU crowd and pad the Tiger lead to 21-13.
Even after senior kicker Drew Alleman booted a 20-yard field goal six minutes later to push the lead to double digits, Hill said he never felt as if the Tigers had the game in the bag.
“I just thought we would be able to get more drives together,” Hill said. “They made it tough for us at times. We just couldn’t execute and I felt like we just kind of crumbled.”
Down eleven and heading into the fourth quarter, Boyd went to work spreading the ball around the field and taking advantage of the winded and vulnerable Tiger secondary.
After getting down to the LSU eight yard line on it’s first drive of the fourth, Clemson finally got the tough nosed LSU defense it had expected and was held to a 24-yard field goal by Catanzaro.
Clemson responded with stout defense of its own, forcing two Mettenberger incompletions and setting up shop at its own 23 after an LSU punt.
Taking only four minutes and change, Boyd picked apart the LSU secondary as he eventually found Hopkins again for his second score of the game to pull the Tigers within two.
Boyd short-hopped the throw on the two-point conversion attempt, however, and LSU remained ahead.
With three timeouts remaining, Clemson coach Dabo Swinney was prepared to burn all three as his team gave the ball back to LSU near midfield after a pooch kickoff.
Miles, however, had other ideas.
He called three consecutive pass plays, two of which fell incomplete, and took only 1:04 off the clock.
“We were very fortunate after that two point conversion miss that I didn’t have to use any of my timeouts,” Swinney said. “I think [Miles] felt confident with the plays. All of us as coaches are going to dial up the things you believe in.”
Miles was blunt in his assessment of his team’s final offensive series, as he watched Clemson consistently crowd the line of scrimmage with eight or nine players.
“We had to throw the football,” Miles said.
Taking over at the 25-yard line after LSU punter Jamie Keehn’s touchback, Clemson and Boyd quickly found itself behind the eight-ball as it faced a 4th and 16.
As he seemingly did all evening, Hopkins got free and hauled in a pass on the 40 to give the Tigers a fresh set of downs and rile up the pro-Clemson crowd.
“We thought if we stayed on top of the routes we’d get the ball to come out early with some pressure,” Chavis said. “Sometimes you live by the sword and die by the sword. We thought it was the right call at the right time.”
Aided by a pass interference on LSU junior safety Eric Reid, Clemson maneuvered its way down to the LSU 20 to set up the game winning kick and ensuing bedlam as Clemson players and coaches flooded the field.
“This is a landmark win,” Swinney said. “Not only did they win 11 [games for the first time in 31 years], but they did it in fine fashion.”
