Clemson safety played through shoulder injury throughout 2020

CLEMSON — Lannden Zanders openly admits that last year wasn’t his best.

The Clemson safety appeared in 10 games in 2020, with nine starts, but he wasn’t always great. Zanders missed too many tackles and took bad angles at times, leading to some big plays for opponents.

As it turns out, there was a reason for that.

Zanders suffered a severe shoulder injury during fall camp and played through it all season, he revealed on Thursday. He only missed two games, sitting out against Pittsburgh and Virginia Tech after he said he had some nerve damage during the Notre Dame game in the regular season.

But for most of the year, the North Carolina native played through the pain after suffering a torn labrum and a little bit of a torn rotator cuff about halfway through fall camp last year.

“Before my injury I feel like I was playing my best football. Then I tore my shoulder in fall camp. Talking to the doctors and stuff, them telling me I would need surgery and whatnot, it kind of got to me mentally,” Zanders said Thursday. “So I feel like all year I was mentally down, not really focused on football, just really trying to protect myself and that really affected my game.”

Zanders was criticized at times last year for taking bad angles or not being a sure tackler, but it’s because he was trying to not hit with his right shoulder or be in a position where he might land on it while falling.

Just about every play of the 2020 season it was on his mind.

“It affects me big-time mentally. When you have an injury and you’re just so worried about it, you think about how you’re going to tackle,” Zanders said. “When that happens you mess up your angles, your pursuit angles and how you wanna come down and stuff. So it definitely messes up you mentally and also affects you physically.”

Zanders estimates he was about 65-70 percent last year.

Still, he finished with seventh on the team with 34 tackles. He had 2.5 tackles for loss, a sack, 3 pass breakups and 4 quarterback pressures.

“There were times during games when it would pop out and stuff but with a torn labrum you can’t really do anything about it, just pop it back in and go back out there,” Zanders said.

He estimates it popped out once or twice per game.

Zanders had surgery this offseason and now feels 100 percent healthy. So what does a fully healthy Lannden Zanders look like?

“We’ll just have to see,” he said with a smile.