Is time running out on Dabo Swinney at Clemson?
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CHARLOTTE — The humbling that Clemson endured last season should have landed on Dabo Swinney like a revelation. Instead, he showed up to the ACC football media kickoff and tried to explain it like a bad hair day.
"We've had 15 winning seasons, 13 (of) 10-plus wins, 14 nine-plus and we won 11 championships in the past 15 years," Swinney said. "And then you have a season like last year and that's kind of what everyone wants to focus on."
If you're waiting for ol' Dabo to change, to evolve, to be moved off the core beliefs that once led him to the top of college football, he made it very clear here Thursday that's not the way his tenure at Clemson is going to end.
Either he will be proven right or it will be over. For someone who looks in the mirror and still sees more championships than warts, there doesn't appear to be a third way.
"We didn't win the close games. We didn't finish in the fourth quarter. We didn't run the ball effectively. We played the worst pass defense of my coaching career," Swinney said, explaining Clemson's crash from preseason No. 4 to 7-6 last season. "So that's my fault. But it's football stuff. It's football stuff, so that's our focus. We've got to fix the football stuff."
And if he doesn't?
That's the question that hangs over Clemson heading into the 18th and arguably most interesting season of Swinney's career.
Just 56, he is the same age Nick Saban was when he started to rebuild Alabama. And yet for the last few years, Swinney has increasingly looked like a man on the clock, stewing in defiance while leading a program whose fan base has little interest in watching their living legend become a relic.
You cannot reasonably place someone with Swinney's equity on a traditional hot seat. But you can't deny the potential for how ugly it might get if 2026 looks anything like 2025.
"Haters hate, right?" Swinney said. "I don't know who wrote that song, but the one thing about haters: When you win, it don't matter what they say. And when you lose, it don't matter what you say. So focus on 'Let's go get better.' And the good news is, 'Hey man, we've got a lot to stand on.'"
Dabo, as usual, was just getting started.
"We've won this league three times this decade," he continued. "You talk about all that we haven't done. And even with seven wins last year, we're still one of the top 10 winningest programs in college football this decade. We're seventh in wins and second in championships this decade. We're No. 1 in draft picks, No. 1 in graduation, No. 1 in retention.
"These aren't make-believe things, alright? But you know what else is true? We stunk last year. We lost some games we should have won, but how about we give the opponents some credit? How about we give other coaches some credit? Football is not easy. It's hard. We're not perfect, but we're consistent, and it's a new year."
When you talk to folks at Clemson, you get the sense that despite Swinney's compulsion to lean on his résumé, there has been a degree of introspection since last season and he has been gently nudged to get with the times. It's not 2016 anymore and it's never going to be again.
But the other reality at Clemson is that any changes — whether they were optional or not — have to be consistent with Dabo's worldview. He doesn't know how to operate a program any other way.
And until we see Clemson on the field at LSU on Sept. 5, it's unclear how much has changed in the first place.
His "new" offensive coordinator, Chad Morris, was his old offensive coordinator. And his new quarterback, Christopher Vizzina, is a product of the same philosophy of leaning on in-house talent that has led to mediocre results ever since Trevor Lawrence left for the NFL.
"We made a decision that we weren't going to go and get some, you know, shiny object at quarterback," Swinney said, referring to the higher-profile quarterbacks that entered the transfer portal after last season. "And if it doesn't work out, we're going to be just raked over the coals for that. But you've got to make decisions that you believe in, and we always do what we think at Clemson is best for our team, for the long-term health of our team, for the organization, etc., and there's a reason why we had confidence in the decision we made.
"And that's because we're there every day. And CV has earned the opportunity to go be the starting quarterback at Clemson based on everything we've observed. … Our guy could have left 10 times and somebody would have paid him a ton of money and he could have gone and done that. But this kid has stayed loyal to Clemson and he's done everything he's been asked to do, and when he's had an opportunity to play, he's played well."
Loyalty might be an aspirational value, but it is not a metric that translates to on-field success. The last two teams that won the College Football Playoff (Indiana and Ohio State) have been led by quarterbacks who transferred in for one year, and the last three quarterbacks who won the Heisman Trophy did it at a different school from where they started.
Championship rings are shiny objects, too. And it's been a long time since Swinney looked like a coach who can win one.
"Ain't none of y'all gonna say anything good about us," he said. "I've been dead. I'm gone. I think I'm still here. But it's not about that either. It never has been. If it was about what people predicted, I'd have been gone a long time ago. It's about what you do."
On that, everyone can agree.
After nearly a decade of dominance followed by five years of clear decline, what Swinney does with this team, this season, will be among the most compelling stories in college football. If it doesn't work yet again, everyone involved will have to ask the question nobody at Clemson really wants to answer: Where do you go from here?
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