CHRONICLE SPORTS CORRESPONDENT zach@clemsonmaven.io

Trevor Lawrence had a moment before the Tigers took the field against Florida State to share his heart.

The Clemson quarterback showed why he’s not only the undisputed leader of the Tiger offense, but the entire team.

“Coach Swinney does some random things in meetings, like he’ll ask people if they got anything to say, so we had a couple guys stand up,” Lawrence said. “I just told the guys, you know don’t waste a day. We have, at most, three months of this season left and you’re going to look back, and if you didn’t do all the things you could have done, you’re going to have some regrets.

“That’s the thing I wanted to tell them, is don’t waste a day, you know in three months you’ll get a break, you can just relax and kind of rethink everything, but now let’s just go to work and take every step and take advantage of everything we have.

“We got to the top of the mountain last year and starting over this year, ranked No. 1 preseason, then to have a close game, we didn’t play great so I can see why we got moved, but it’s just more fuel to the fire, so we need to bring back the ROY (Rest of Y’all) bus, it’s awesome.”

The Tigers heeded the words of their leader, as they put together their best performance of the season.

Against the Seminoles, the Tigers amassed 552 yards of offense and held the Seminoles to only 253 yards.

“This was definitely one of the best weeks (of preparation), especially since it was 2 weeks kind of, so I feel like every practice was good,” Lawrence said. “but I don’t think we had a practice where we were like, ‘uh, don’t think that was our best day,” so we had really good practices.’

If Saturday, which saw the South Carolina Gamecocks go to Georgia and knock off the No. 3 Bulldogs, showed the Tigers anything it was that you cannot cheat the game or take any game for granted.

“It’s like I said with North Carolina,” Lawrence said. “Every team has good players. They have coaches that are full-time that they pay a lot of money to try to win games, so you can’t just go into a game expecting to win. I didn’t see the game, the 2nd half or anything like that, you can’t take teams for granted, especially teams like South Carolina.”

ETIENNE RETURN TO FORM: Running back Travis Etienne had two weeks to stew over his performance in the Tigers’ 1-point win at North Carolina. His performance at North Carolina included missing key blocks and not doing the little things right.

But all of that was corrected in Saturday’s 45-14 win over Florida State.

“I mean his fundamentals were terrible at North Carolina,” Swinney said. “Looked like he had never played before, you know? The good news is we have lots of great film capturing him doing everything right, you know, but he just had a bad day. His fundamentals were terrible, his technique was terrible, he’s playing on the edges, he’s playing with his shoulder and he really hurt us in pass protection, but he cares. He just had a bad day, and we all have bad days, but how you respond, and man he came back and we had that touchdown, and he picked it up.

“He did an awesome job and just really proud of him, and I knew he’d play well. I knew he would. I knew that ... I told him (Friday) night, ‘We’re going to play our best game.’”

TIGERS IN THE POLLS: Clemson held at No. 2 in the coaches poll, as LSU surged from No. 5 to No. 3 after their win over

then No. 7 Florida. However, the most surprising poll was the AP, which dropped the Tigers from No. 2 to No. 3 after their dominant 45-14 win over FSU Saturday.

LSU took over the No. 2 spot in the AP Poll.

INJURY UPDATE: “So, we came through the game really well,” Swinney said. “We pulled Tee (Higgins) out. Tee kind of strained his hamstring and we pulled him out. Just really didn’t ... I think it was 42-0 or something, and you know, he came over, said he just kind of felt it tighten up a little bit, so we just held him out, but he set the tone. Had the first big play of the game and did a nice job there, but other than that I think we’re in pretty good shape.”

Clemson travels to Louisville Saturday. The game will air at noon on ABC (WOLO Channel 25) and can be heard on WCOS (1400 AM) or the TuneIn Radio phone app.