Bowden: Swinney has taken Clemson to the next level

by David Hood - Senior Writer - Thu Jul 26 11:10:46 GMT-04:00 2012

The 2012 football season will be Dabo Swinney Dabo Swinney
Head Coach
View Full Profile ’s fourth full season at the helm of the Clemson program, and even his former boss admits that the program is in better shape than when Swinney took over.

Swinney took over in mid-2008 for former head coach Tommy Bowden, a season that started with an embarrassing loss to Alabama in the season opener and included a 12-7 loss to Wake Forest that ended up being Bowden’s last game at Clemson.

There have been ups and downs to be sure, and the downs are easily remembered by every Clemson fan – a 6-7 record in 2010; last year’s loss in the Orange Bowl; baffling defensive lapses and a three-year losing streak to arch-rival South Carolina.

But there have been more ups than downs, including two trips to the ACC Championship Game, an ACC Championship last season and a recruiting upswing that has many believing – including Swinney – that the program may indeed be on the rise.

He has a 29-19 overall record as head coach, but that includes a 4-3 interim record in 2008. As Clemson’s full-time coach, he is 25-16, with two Atlantic Division titles on his resume. Just for fun, I looked up the coaching records of some of the game’s best coaches through their first three seasons, and noticed that Nick Saban was 19-16 in his first three season at Michigan St; Les Miles was 21-16 at Oklahoma St.; Steve Spurrier was 20-13-1 at Duke; heck, even Mack Brown was 8-24 in his first three seasons at North Carolina.

The reason I said that is to say that Swinney is doing what a young coach should do – learning from his mistakes and getting better and playing to his strengths, one of which happens to be recruiting.

I have covered Swinney through almost every step of his head coaching career – one of the very first stories I wrote for TigerNet in the middle of the 2008 season covered Bowden's departure and the hiring of an interim Swinney. I have noticed something different about Swinney over the last several months: He is more of a CEO for the program, taking a step back out of the minute-to-minute operations and becoming more of a manager.

I noticed it last spring and I even noticed it during his high school camp in June. Perhaps I wasn’t as observant earlier, but I truly believe what Clemson fans are seeing is a young coach that is maturing before our eyes.

I spoke with Bowden last weekend at the ACC Football Kickoff in Greensboro, and Bowden told me that Swinney has taken the program to the next level.

“We were recruiting pretty good, and when you were as close as we were it just takes one player to make a difference,” Bowden said. “Like Sammy WatkinsSammy Watkins
So. Wide Receiver
#2 6-1, 200
Fort Myers, FL
View Full Profile - take him off that team last season and maybe they only have seven or eight wins. He has the new facilities, and the program wasn’t in bad shape when he took over. But with that said, Dabo has done a good job of taking it to the next level, which a lot of guys can’t do.”

Bowden said the qualities that Swinney is now beginning to exhibit are what led him to recommend his wide receivers coach to athletic director Terry Don Phillips in his exit interview.

“When I talked to Terry Don that morning, that is what I saw in my mind and why I recommended him,” Bowden said. “I knew he had the recruiting skills, the people skills and the ability to manage people. It wasn’t about the X’s and O’s. I think he had a little edge to him because he never had been a coordinator, even though he could have been.”

Bowden said he noticed Swinney take a step forward a year ago with the hiring of offensive coordinator Chad Morris and in this year’s hire of defensive coordinator Brent Venables.

“I called plays, and my father called plays for a lot of years,” he said. “Sometimes that is not always the best thing for a head coach. If you look at his hire of Chad Morris, he now has a head coach for the offense. He hired Venables to be the head coach of the defense. Now, his job is to manage those guys and let them coach. He is doing what you need to do in college right now – you manage your staff and the players.”

Bowden said he has also seen Swinney make the tough decisions he had to make in order to make the program better, even if that means admitting he made a mistake.

“One of the toughest things you can do as head coach is to make decisions with your staff,” he said. “Billy Napier was a good friend of his and a good coach, but you have to make good decisions if you are going to be successful at this level. He has shown he can do it. He has shown that he can do that with some of the hires he has made.”

The jury is still out on the 2012 season and beyond, but with two dynamic coordinators acting as head coaches on their respective sides of the ball, facilities continually being built and upgraded and an influx of recruiting talent beginning to fill out the roster, the arrow looks like it is pointed up.