Clemson hasn’t held a scrimmage and one-on-one work has been limited, but one freshman is already turning heads in spring practice.
Freshman defensive tackle Amare Adams out of Florence (SC) South Florence entered Clemson as a consensus national top 100 player ranked as the 23rd-best player in the nation by 247Sports, the highest 247Sports ranking of any signee in this class. Adams earned five-star billing from 247Sports, which also listed him as the fourth-best defensive tackle in the country and the top player in South Carolina.
He’s already made people take notice at practice, with one observer telling me, “Adams is just a grown a** man.”
Head coach Dabo Swinney concurs, but cautions that Adams still has a lot to learn.
“Oh man, he can freaking move. He’s a high school kid. That’s the other thing about our game, different from the pros,” Swinney said. “When the pros do OTAs and all that, these guys have played football forever, right? They’re pros because they’ve played forever. And if you don’t know how to pull on the counter or run a slant versus inside leverage, well you’re not there. They bring somebody in that can. But our game is developmental. Amare – what peer has he had on Friday night? What peer has he had at practice? This is the first time in his life he’s going to meet someone like Tristan Leigh. He’s going to meet Harris Sewell. He’s going meet some dudes every day in practice.”
However, Swinney admits that Adams is impressive.
“Amare, he’s big, he’s freaky athletic. He’s already a leader. He looks great in shorts, but we don’t play the game in shorts,” Swinney said. “I’ve not seen him with any scheme on top of him or anything like that. But just watching him in mat drills and watching him run, he looks a little bit like Bryan Bresee as far as that big-bodied, athletic type dude. Kind of freaky but with some power of a Dexter (Lawrence).
“But he’s more polished than Bryan was coming in here. Brian was just the same thing. If you go back and watch Bryan Bresee in high school, he just stood up and he’d throw whoever away and go make the tackle. And so he had to learn. He had never really played with his pads low and I can Amare’s a little more advanced technically, but excited about him going to be fun to watch him.”
Center Ryan Linthicum, a former high school teammate of Bresee in addition to his time as a Tiger, walked through a list of the young offensive linemen who have caught his eye, but mentioned Adams as his standout on the defensive side.
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