Really good story on Dabo's

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Re: Really good story on Dabo's "second act"

May 7, 2025, 8:53 PM

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6327104/2025/05/07/dabo-swinney-clemson-football-nil-playoff/

Dabo Swinney’s next act at Clemson: Is the two-time national champ getting a second wind?

By Seth Emerson

May 7, 2025 6:00 am EDT

CLEMSON, S.C. — There’s a lot going on in Dabo Swinney’s office. It’s less a place of work than a hall of fame wing. His two national championship trophies sit on a table, impossible for visitors to miss. Mementos and pictures from other great Clemson moments are everywhere. On a wall is a video screen that plays rotating photos: Dabo with players, Dabo with friends, Dabo on a fishing boat with Nick Saban.

He’s already lived a great life. He’s already had a great career. The stuff college football is dealing with, Dabo Swinney doesn’t need this. He could walk away now, like Tony Bennett, Jay Wright and so many other accomplished college basketball coaches. Like Swinney himself once hinted he might if things got out of hand in college football, as many say they have.

And yet here is Swinney, 55 years old, in that spacious office, still leading little ol’ Clemson through all the chaos, as the transfer portal and overt pay-for-play principles reshape the sport.

Did he ever do a self-examination on whether he wanted to proceed? Did he ever ask himself if he was the right guy for this era? For once Swinney seemed surprised by a question, flustered almost.

“No. No. No, absolutely not,” he said, then went into one of his trademark 500-word monologues, about people writing things about him, outside perceptions and why he’s not only still here but also ready to thrive.

“I’ve probably had as much fun these last few years as I’ve ever had,” he said. “I’ve told our staff, boys, buckle up, it’s about to get really interesting. But the more chaos the better for Clemson. We’re built for it.”

Photo: Dabo Swinney and QB Cade Klubnik (right) lead a team talented enough for another CFP nod. (Bob Donnan / Imagn Images)

It was almost a year ago that Cade Klubnik was called into that spacious office of Swinney’s. Klubnik was coming off an uneven first year as Clemson’s starting quarterback. There were calls for Clemson to replace him in the transfer portal, not just from fans and media but from agents for quarterbacks, or whoever makes those back-channel calls.

Klubnik last month recalled what Swinney told him:

“There’s people calling me to come play here, different quarterbacks, to pretty much come replace you. But I believe in you. And you’re our quarterback and you’re my guy.”

Klubnik went on to finish second in the ACC in touchdown passes, behind only Cam Ward. He enters his senior season with some Heisman buzz. He looks back on that sit-down with Swinney as a turning point.

“It filled me with confidence and belief in myself that I could do it. That just meant a ton,” Klubnik said.

That story — sticking with your guy, and that faith being rewarded — is why Swinney thinks Clemson is well-positioned in the new era. For years the narrative has been the opposite: Swinney’s reluctance (some would say refusal) to take transfers was holding the program back. It was easy to tie it to the program’s on-field dip, as the Tigers went from making every College Football Playoff between 2015 and 2020 to missing three in a row, pretty neatly coinciding with the introduction of unlimited transferring and pay-for-play via name, image and likeness freedoms.

Then came last season. The CFP expanded to 12 teams, and Clemson made it, albeit barely, via Nolan Hauser’s 56-yard field goal as time expired to win the ACC championship and clinch an automatic bid. In the first round, Clemson lost at Texas by two touchdowns, the closest of the four games of the CFP’s first weekend, which isn’t saying much. But expansion or not, a CFP bid was once again attained, and with Klubnik and much of that 2024 team returning, a sense of validation set in.

It’s not that Clemson is still clinging stubbornly to the past. The Tigers added three transfers this offseason. Athletic director Graham Neff wrote in a November letter to fans that Clemson intended to share the maximum amount of revenue with athletes once the courts permit schools to do so this summer. The same week, Swinney told reporters, “Ain’t nobody gonna have more money than Clemson … for the first time ever.” That money is finding its way to players, especially Klubnik and other proven contributors.

“Those guys are doing pretty good,” Swinney told The Athletic in April, then added, “But they earned it.”

Clemson’s overall strategy remains the same: Recruit, develop, retain. The last part is a particular point of pride for Swinney. Maybe they don’t bring in many transfers, but they also don’t lose many. And that’s all while continuing to emphasize academics — Clemson annually has one of college football’s top graduation rates, and its 99 percent mark tied for the best at the power conference level in the most recent NCAA survey.

Essentially, Swinney is banking on Clemson’s culture to capitalize on a new market inefficiency. He talks of players and parents looking for a program with the values that Clemson holds, the more old-school approach. And those are the players they get, according to Swinney.

“As it’s gotten crazy we doubled down on who we are,” Swinney said. “We’re not trying to prove something. We’re not trying to be right. We’re just doing what we believe is right, for our program. And I think that’s what everybody has to do. I don’t sit around and judge other people. I think everybody has to do what’s right for their program, with whatever situation they have. And just be who they are.”

Players say the portal strategy, or lack thereof, resonates in the locker room. In a recent interview on Ryan Clark’s podcast, Clemson players TJ Parker and Peter Woods said it makes players want to work harder for the program.

Klubnik echoed that in an interview with The Athletic: Players feel they have a long runway to prove themselves.

“Because everybody knows you’ve got to do something stupid to get kicked out of here,” Klubnik said. “That’s not the case everywhere, if you have three bad practices you might get booted somewhere else. But coach Swinney believes in the guys he recruited.”

He’s been here awhile. Swinney arrived at Clemson in 2003, hired by Tommy Bowden as receivers coach after a brief foray into real estate sales. Five years later, Swinney was the interim coach upon Bowden’s midseason firing, and as Clemson beat Steve Spurrier and South Carolina in the rivalry game, the crowd chanted “Da-bo, Da-bo, Da-bo,” with star tailback CJ Spiller standing on a bench and leading the cheers.

After another five years, Swinney and Clemson beat Urban Meyer and Ohio State in the Orange Bowl. They won another Orange Bowl in 2015 before losing to Saban and Alabama in the CFP championship game. Clemson won its first national title since 1981 the next year, then it won it all again in 2018.

All along, Clemson wasn’t winning with elite recruiting classes. Swinney himself whips out the fact that the Tigers’ average recruiting ranking is 13.6, dating to his first class in 2009. It helps that a couple of those recruits were quarterbacks Deshaun Watson and Trevor Lawrence. When Lawrence left for the NFL, the struggles and eventual transfer of the highly rated DJ Uiagalelei, and the unspectacular first year for Klubnik, may have had more to do with the program’s perceived slip than Swinney’s approach to transfers.

Even still, Swinney points out Clemson has gone 10-3, 11-3, 9-4 and 10-4 since Lawrence went No. 1 to the Jaguars.

“We’ve won three national championships in 130 years, but it seems now if we don’t win it, we’re held to a different standard than everybody else,” he said.

Swinney also has been known to be loyal with his staff, going more than a decade without dismissing a non-coordinator. That was the main source of frustration from “Tyler from Spartanburg” in a now-infamous call to Swinney’s radio show during the 2023 season, though the overall tenor was, to quote Tyler, “Why are we paying ya $11.5 million to go 4-4?”

Swinney had already made a change at offensive coordinator before the 2023 season, bringing in Garrett Riley from TCU, and after the 2024 season he hired Tom Allen from Penn State to run the defense. In each case Swinney cashiered longtime assistants to bring in outsiders.

Was this evidence of Swinney feeling the heat? Maybe, but he has made cutthroat moves before: One of his first acts as interim coach was to fire the offensive coordinator (who had been his boss), and he fired Billy Napier as offensive coordinator two years later.

“Nothing’s changed in the last 16 years as far as how we run the program,” Swinney said. “Obviously you adapt to things around college football. A lot of things have changed in my almost 17 years as a head coach. But we stay true to who we are. I know there’s a lot of narratives and things that people create and write. I always say you can have your own narratives and you can have your opinions but you can’t have your own facts.”

Swinney, leaning forward in his chair, has the facts ready.

“We’re the fifth-winningest team in the country since 2020, when everyone says we’ve been really down. We’ve been to the Playoff seven out of the last 10 years. We’ve won this league eight out of the last 10 years. We’ve won eight titles and two national championships, so 10 championships in the last 10 years. Nobody’s done that in college football. And oh, by the way, the highest graduation rate in America. And the highest retention rate, in the most chaotic period in the history of football these last three years.”

Photo: Dabo Swinney, who appeared as a surprise guest at a Savannah Bananas game this spring, is not afraid of college sports’ new era. (Ken Ruinard / staff / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)

About that chaos. Swinney has been the face of resistance to change, once saying he would leave if college football were professionalized. But in a nearly hour-long interview with The Athletic he said several times he sees the coming era as the “best time in the history of college football.” He still sounded like a traditionalist in moments, including when he argued for going back to the old transfer rules where everyone but graduate transfers has to sit a year after switching schools. But he doesn’t bemoan players getting paid. He predicts a Super League is coming to college football and talks of it favorably.

In the short term, Swinney is excited about this year: Klubnik going into his third year as starter, eight starters back on each side of the ball, plus Hauser and his powerful foot. In the long term he’s sure Clemson is positioned for the new era. The end of the lawsuit against the ACC means Clemson has its conference home settled for five years, will presumably be getting more money as a result of the league’s new revenue distribution models and will arguably have an easier path to the 12-team CFP than most big brands.

Do you have a second wind, Swinney is asked? He hesitates, not quite agreeing with the premise but not disagreeing with it either.

“I’ve had a ton of fun. I’ve enjoyed it. I love the challenge. I love learning,” he said. “And I love the challenge of equipping for this platform of education and football. I love leading our staff. Because sometimes things can be unsettling. And you look around and say, Eh, listen, that’s not who we are. Let’s be who we are. I think unique and different attracts unique and different.”

It all sounds great. But will Clemson be able to sustain it? Will it get back to national championship level? This may be the second act of the Swinney era. It may involve some adapting to the times. But it is not a complete rethinking.

“No, we’re not going to compromise,” he said. “Here’s our purpose, here was our purpose 16 years ago, and that’s still the purpose. And everything we do is about that, period. And as long as we keep that as our north star, we’ll be all right.”

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Really good story on Dabo's "second act"

Re: Really good story on Dabo's "second act"

Re: Really good story on Dabo's "second act"

Re: Really good story on Dabo's "second act"

Re: Really good story on Dabo's "second act"

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