Clemson QB Cade Klubnik Feels 'Really Confident About This Team' Despite Early Setbacks

It’s easy in a top 10 college football game to lose motivation and belief. However, that’s not the Clemson Tigers' quarterback, Cade Klubnik.

When speaking to the media on Wednesday afternoon, he believed that it was his job to get the team back into a game-week mentality. Although a loss in the first week to LSU could bring a team down, Klubnik did the opposite: he brought up everybody else. 

“I think that everybody’s looking at someone, and in the position I am, I think that, whether I want it or not, everybody’s looking at me and how I’m going to react,” he said. “I was pissed off after the game, and I was upset, and it took me a few days to really bounce back from it because of the way I played.”

Other players even told him that his infectious energy is influencing others. Referencing the team’s Week 1 loss to Georgia last year, he said he had a player come up to him and commend him on the energy he had following Sunday and Monday of the loss. 

Klubnik said that it created a great week of practice and led to the 66-20 rout against Appalachian State last season. 

“That was just a really good reminder to me, like ‘Hey man, my influence is very heavy, but I got to change my mindset too. I have to attack every single day and attack every week,’” he said. “I think that that’s what I have to do and that’s what needs to be done.”

Klubnik’s safety valve in receiver Antonio Williams influenced the team’s chances of getting into a rhythm throughout the night. However, there were still things that the offense did that the quarterback saw and gave credit to.  

“We played really tough [and] we had great communication all night,” Klubnik said. “We were physical to the very end; we fought until the very end. We never stopped; it would be easy to quit in some of those moments, and we just kept straining until the very end. We just stayed together, that was a really good thing to see.”

Everything is still on the table for Clemson, which is the same scenario as the one a year before. The team has yet to play an ACC game this season, which is the team’s easiest way to get into the 12-team College Football Playoff. 

Klubnik still has confidence in the team, echoing words that head coach Dabo Swinney said in the loss.  

“I feel really confident about this team,” the quarterback said. “I think we’re a really good team that’s going to have a great year, and I think Coach Swinney said it, and he said it to us before. . .’This game gave me no doubt about our team and what we can do,’ but it just totally fulfilled us with confidence in what we can do and what we’re about. It’s just exciting.”

Swinney was also critical of Klubnik. On Tuesday, after looking through film, the head coach saw problems that he had, but he remains optimistic about his standout quarterback. 

“The biggest issue in that game was our best player didn’t play well, and if that’s the biggest issue coming out of that game, sign me up for that,” Swinney said. “Because 2 will respond, [I] promise you, so we all watched the tape and talked about how we all get better this week.”

For Klubnik, it’s all about learning and moving on. 

He’s the coach, and he’s coaching,” he said. “Chin it, learn from it and move on.”

The team has another home game this week against Troy and Klubnik learned his lessons from the loss to LSU. Sometimes, the simple things are the most important, and the Austin, Texas, native realized that some of those things did not happen last week at Memorial Stadium. 

Klubnik plans on fixing those things and remaining himself, and he think that’s all he needs to do for Clemson to be successful. 

“Just do the routine things routinely,” he said. “I think just do the routine things really well and just be decisive, just be decisive and stay aggressive throughout the game, I think that’s probably one of the biggest things. Just go be me. I don’t need to go be special and go try to make plays that aren’t there. Just make the plays that are there, trust the game plan, trust my preparation, trust what we’ve been doing all week and go execute.”