Dabo Swinney, in a fit of delusion that has become all too frequent in recent years, basically dared Clemson to fire him earlier this week.
“If Clemson’s tired of winning, they can send me on my way,” he said during a 14-minute rant that was supposed to be a defense against his critics but sounded mostly like a pity party with one invited guest. “I’ll go somewhere else and coach. I ain’t going to the beach. Hell, I’m 55. I got a long way to go.”
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Clemson won’t send Swinney anywhere, of course. Besides the irresponsible finances involved — Swinney’s $60 million buyout stands as a monument to the kind of unnecessary coach worship that schools no longer need to do in this NIL-driven era — there isn’t any scenario where a Clemson coaching search in 2025 goes well.
Any time things have gotten rough the last few years, Swinney and his allies have held that reality as a be-careful-what-you-wish-for cudgel over a fan base they increasingly see as ungrateful for two national championships and a long run of sustained success.
But that also works the other direction.
If Swinney is so convinced that he could go somewhere else and provide a new, more appreciative fan base with national championships, maybe that’s exactly what he should do.
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In the immediate aftermath of Clemson’s 34-21 loss to Syracuse on Saturday, would anyone be particularly upset?
It’s really that bad at Clemson right now.
Not only is this a 1-3 football team that dumped a bucket of ice on top of its overheated preseason expectations, it’s even worse because this was supposed to be the year Clemson had built toward. After several years where the talent level was clearly down a tick from the national championship teams, the experts spent all summer telling us Clemson was loaded on defense and finally had more playmakers on offense to help senior quarterback Cade Klubnik make the leap to the top of the NFL Draft.
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And now it’s all gone bust.
The interesting thing is, most Clemson fans have not wanted Swinney to be fired. They understand the wilderness their program wandered through in the 1990s and early 2000s, and they understand how he got them to the top of the mountain with his unique energy and will.
What they want is for him to be different, to adapt to a sport that has changed all around him and to admit that what you’ve accomplished in the past is not a defense for where you’re failing now.
That’s where Swinney has completely lost the plot.
In his infamous press conference last week, Swinney’s defiance was not rooted in selling a plan to fix what’s broken or vowing to make the kinds of philosophical changes that would get Clemson back to where it was from 2015-2020.
Instead, what he offered fans was the energy of a college student who can’t stop talking about that time they were the high school valedictorian while they’re putting a whole bunch of C’s on the report card.
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“What’s so bad about our program?” he whined. “If we stink because we haven’t played for the national championship since January of ’20, well, I guess we stink. But why are we held to a different standard from all these other teams out there who ain’t ever won nothing?”
It’s amazing that he refuses to acknowledge why that’s the case.
Dabo, you created the standard. In fact, you had a catchphrase for it that’s painted all over the walls in Clemson’s building: “Best is the Standard.”
Why would anybody — especially you as the head coach — expect to hold the second-best program of the 2010s to the same standard as NC State or Ole Miss? And why wouldn’t you expect it to be a source of frustration when you haven’t lived up to that standard for five years?
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We all know Swinney’s track record. But that really has nothing to do with where Clemson is now, except in one respect: That success has enabled Swinney to get every possible resource the university can offer in service of trying to win championships.
That includes his $11.3 million salary.
It makes you wonder, who’s the ungrateful one here?
With Saturday’s loss to Syracuse, which followed a familiar script of offensive ineptitude and defensive underperformance, Clemson’s season is effectively over. Now it’s time for Swinney to stop the whining and self-pity and start figuring out how he’s going adapt in every area of the program, from offensive philosophy to NIL to recruiting.
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And he needs to do it with winning as the sole focus, not trying to prove some quixotic point about what he believes is righteous in college athletics.
Clemson isn’t ever likely to send Swinney on his way. But if he isn’t capable of change and doesn’t believe it’s fair to hold him to the standard that he created there, then he should take the initiative and make this season his last.
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