CLEMSON — Late Saturday night, Vic Koenning sat outside Clemson’s Georgia Dome locker room, a look of quiet frustration covering his face.

Clemson’s defensive coordinator had watched his unit allow one of the worst performances of his three-plus year tenure, giving up 419 total offense yards in a 34-10 season-opening loss to Alabama.

“Watching this game film,” he said, “is going to be embarrassing.”

The main culprit? Missed tackles. Time after time, Alabama tailbacks Glen Coffee and Mark Ingram slammed into Tiger defenders, bouncing off for four-and five-yard gains. Koenning said afterwards Clemson missed “about 50” tackles.

“We could have calculated them (from the game film) but I didn’t sit there and count them,” he said Tuesday . “It would have been easy. It was enough. Too many.”

This week, Koenning and his charges went back to basics — stressing tackling and physicality to prepare for Saturday’s 3:30 p.m. home opener against The Citadel.

The Bulldogs won’t provide the test Alabama did, but that isn’t nearly as big a concern as tackling correctly.

“We knew (Alabama was) good, but they were better than what we thought,” Koenning said. “I take responsibility of trying to teach tackling. But we did not do a good enough job of limiting yards after contact. It was three and four yards every time. That was 99.9 percent of it.”

Why didn’t Koenning calculate missed tackles on his final analysis? Because it might have been too tough to separate missed tackles from just plain bad tackling. The Crimson Tide held the ball for over 41 minutes, which included three scoring drives of 14 plays (chopping between 6:52 and 8:54 from the clock) while converting 11 of 17 third-down tries.

“When you miss them, when a guy drags you four yards though he goes down, I mean it was third and one, third and two, third and one and a half, third and two,” Koenning said. “Those are offenses that are going to get 75-80 percent of those. That’s what it was like all night. That’s why they had those drives. That part of it, we’ve got to find a way of doing a better job of getting our power base behind us and not lunges.”

Looking back, would Koenning have changed anything? You bet — like how he taught tackling.

“I would have tried to approach how we teach tackling different,” he said. “I think they had 54 running plays. As a defensive staff we saw that 51 out of 54 of those run plays, initial contact was made within a yard of the line of scrimmage. We had guys there. Now a big part of it was that we didn’t get more than one guy there because of the way they were double-teaming linemen.”

Could Clemson have been better prepared with more preseason physicality? Probably. The Tigers rested key starters on both sides of the ball during scrimmages and certain practices, including safeties Michael Hamlin and Chris Clemons.

Hamlin said earlier this week that he wasn’t pleased with the lack of tackling, and Koenning seemed to agree — although he didn’t have much say in the matter.

“That’s not my call. I think coach Bowden is as good as any coach in America at taking recommendations,” Koenning said. “We practice tackling 10 minutes per position per day, per practice. “We try to do what we can. I think from being a head coach, if you do that all the time, you get diminishing returns. If you get CJ (Spiller) hurt, Aaron Kelly, Jacoby (Ford) and Ricky (Sapp) banged up, that’s something you don’t want.”

There’s little they can do about their lack of preparedness now. All the Tigers can do is tackle more — and hopefully, tackle better.

“We didn’t tackle well (against Alabama), didn’t do a lot of things well,” said sophomore “Sam” linebacker Scotty Cooper. “But we’ve looked at the film and corrected that stuff to find out what was wrong. Hopefully we’ll be better.”