Swinney on DJU, Notre Dame, Klubnik, first loss, goals, Jeff Scott

CLEMSON — Sunday evening Clemson head football coach Dabo Swinney addressed members of the media in his weekly teleconference, this time to take a closer look at his team’s disappointing 35-14 loss to Notre Dame upon Sunday’s staff review of the game.

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The Tigers head into a week of preparation ahead of next Saturday’s 3:30 p.m. ET matchup with Louisville in Death Valley.

The following is an abbreviated transcript of Sunday evening’s teleconference.

OPENING STATEMENTS: “First of all, injuries in the game … we had one in Beaux Collins. He will definitely be out this week. We will get a better evaluation on him in the first part of the week. We still don’t have total clarification on Xavier Thomas yet. They’re (physicians) still consulting on the longterm plan for him and what they’re going to do in the short-term.

“Like I said last night, I’m really disappointed with the way we played. We needed to win the turnover margin and stop the run. It’s just that simple. They only had nine completions but they were the more physical team. The critical play was the blocked punt. We lost the momentum. It was a really bad night.

“The good news is we are a better team than I saw last night. Tough day when you know you’re better than you perform. We’re 8-1, not 5-3. We own it, we learn from it and we just get back to work. That’s what we have to do. We can’t do anything about what happened yesterday. We’ll get the team back in here tomorrow and see if we can grow from this. It’s a chance to reset. A lot of ball left and a lot of opportunity left. The only thing off the table for us is that we know we’re not going to be undefeated.

“We have a great opportunity this week to go win the division title outright. We want to have the best finish we can possibly have. I’m excited about a new opportunity this week. We failed in our objective yesterday but we want to recommit to the standard that we talk about.”

Q: Looking at the first half, that final score that they got, how critical was that?

SWINNEY: “It was. They only completed one pass but it was a long drive. They just physically took it to us. You’re one score and back in the game, but we just never responded in any facet. We didn’t get the burst or spark that we needed. Just not much positive in the game. We had a few guys individually who played well but outside of that not much good. We got beat by a better team last night.”

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Q: You have to go back a long way to look at the last time you were physically overwhelmed. Given the rarity of that, how confident are you that it’s limited to that game and not something more pronounced?

SWINNEY: “Just based on what I have seen, we have played better this year. We shut out Syracuse in the second half. They’re a physical team. We’ve done it on several occasions. We have to respond. I know we have good people, good players, good coaches and a lot of people who care. We own it. You have to own it. And we have to fix it. It’s a lot of little things that we…