As media vultures circle, Dabo Swinney only has himself to blame

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When I arrived in Clemson, South Carolina, for my first job out of college, I came bearing the impression that Dabo Swinney was a grinning, Bible-thumping opportunist, all in service of climbing to the top of a sport that rewards such shamelessness.

In other words, he sounded like every other college football coach.

I never got close to Dabo on any real, personal level during the 16 months I spent covering Clemson, with recruiting serving as my primary beat, but I was at every single presser. And I can tell you that underneath the aw-shucks Alabama drawl and the merchandising of his own folksiness, Swinney is sharper than his caricature and better with reporters than most coaches at his level.

But you could also feel, even in casual exchanges, that you were talking to someone who carried himself with the unbridled confidence of a man who believed he’d earned the right to be insulated from any scrutiny, because, for a long time, he had proven the doubters — many of them in the media — wrong.

I wasn’t intimidated to ask him tough questions. In another life, I jumped at the opportunity to do so. But I rarely — and several others on the Clemson beat — challenged Swinney the way we probably should have. Some of that was the outlet I worked for. Mostly, though, it was the same reason nobody except Paul Finebaum challenged him.

He’s Dabo Swinney, and for a long time, that was enough.

That, as it turns out, was the mistake. Not mine specifically, but the sport’s, collectively. Because while everybody was busy extending Dabo Swinney the benefit of the doubt, the infrastructure underneath the empire was quietly rotting, and by the time anyone thought to check the foundation, Clemson was rolling out D.J. Uiagalelei at quarterback and leaning on a Brent Venables defense just to survive a Cheez-It Bowl against Iowa State. The Tigers were still recruiting like a blue blood and developing talent like a blue blood, but the cracks were visible, and they started, as they so often do in this sport, slowly and almost imperceptibly.

Brent Venables left for Oklahoma after the 2021 season, taking with him a defense that had finished top 10 nationally in both rush defense and total defense. Tony Elliott left in the same window for Virginia. Both departures were defensible — coordinators leave for head-coaching jobs, that’s the food chain — but what Swinney did next revealed something enduring about how he thinks the sport should work. He didn’t chase established playcallers. He promoted from within, elevating longtime assistant Brandon Streeter to run the offense and, while handing the defense to Wes Goodwin, a company man who’d been a Clemson grad assistant and analyst for most of a decade. Streeter lasted one season before he was fired. Goodwin lasted three, and the bottom fell out steadily beneath him. By his final year, Clemson’s run defense had collapsed to its worst mark since 2011, culminating in Texas hanging 292 rushing yards on the Tigers in a College Football Playoff blowout.

Swinney, to his credit, tried to correct course by going outside the family. He brought in Garrett Riley, TCU’s Broyles Award–winning offensive coordinator, to modernize an offense that had ossified around the same principles it ran in 2013. For one season, in 2024, it actually worked — sort of. Clemson’s offense operated at a top-18 clip nationally; the Tigers won the ACC, and it briefly looked like Swinney had solved the problem by simply admitting he needed outside help. But by 2025, Clemson’s offense had cratered to 62nd nationally, Riley was let go after a lifeless Pinstripe Bowl loss to Penn State, and Swinney’s response was not to keep hunting for the next outside mind, but to rehire Chad Morris, his own former offensive coordinator from 2011-14, who hadn’t coordinated a collegiate offense since Donald Trump’s first term in office.

On defense, he did bring in Tom Allen, fresh off building one of the nation’s best units at Penn State, to replace Goodwin. Whether that hire arrests the slide still remains to be seen, but it’s telling that it’s one of the few exceptions in a coaching philosophy built almost entirely around the rule: when in doubt, hire the ghost of Clemson past.

Nowhere is the pattern more damning than the offensive line, the one position group Swinney has now handed to three different coaches in five years without ever actually fixing it.

Swinney hired Matt Luke — coaxed out of a two-year retirement — to clean up an offensive line that had cycled through six different starting combinations in twelve games under Thomas Austin the year before. Austin, a two-time All-ACC lineman at Clemson from 2006-09, was promoted to replace the retiring Robbie Caldwell in February 2022. His only prior experience as a position coach came in two seasons at Georgia State before Swinney brought him back to Clemson as an analyst. His line couldn’t generate push in short yardage, burned through combination after combination trying to fix it, and by November 2023, he became the first non-coordinator assistant Swinney had fired in 12 years.

He’s now a high school offensive line coach.

Luke inherited the hardest job of any of these hires, and 2026 is when it caught up with him. Clemson lost four starters off the 2025 line — Tristan Leigh, Walker Parks, Blake Miller, Ryan Linthicum — all in the same offseason. Luke and new coordinator Chad Morris went into the transfer portal specifically looking for an experienced guard or tackle to bridge the gap, and struck out multiple times. Clemson ended the cycle having added zero offensive linemen through the portal, chose to roll with an inexperienced, mostly young group instead, and CBS Sports flagged the Tigers as one of the losers of the entire 2026 transfer cycle specifically because of it. The bill came due in Baton Rouge, where that patchwork line helped produce a 145-yard, 3.0-yards-per-play offensive performance against LSU.

This level of incompetence needs to be studied pic.twitter.com/T3tklff4Au

— Tiger Commenter (@TigerCommenter) September 6, 2026

Clemson keeps entering the portal looking for reinforcements at the position that needs them most, and keeps getting outbid because, in 2026, a competitive NIL offer closes those fights faster than a good sales pitch does, and Swinney’s program has been unwilling or unable to spend at the level required to win them.

Swinney and Clemson have learned the hard way that rosters are no longer built; they’re assembled, disassembled, and reassembled annually. He, of course, was famously among the last coaches in the country to dip into the portal at all, and even now, his use of it serves more as seasoning than sustenance. Swinney’s didn’t take a player of real consequence out of the portal until last season, later than nearly every program at Clemson’s level. This year’s transfer class ranks 31st nationally, according to On3, and the group most in need of outside help, the offensive line, is the one group Clemson added nothing to.

Swinney’s defenders — and he still has plenty, even now — will note, accurately, that last year’s roster was one of the most talented Clemson has fielded in years, loaded with future draft picks. Nine Tigers were selected in the 2026 NFL Draft, tying a program record. That’s not nothing, but Clemson isn’t losing because it can’t recruit. It’s losing because it can no longer coach up or scheme around the talent it recruits, and the man ultimately responsible for that scheme is Swinney himself, who has never been, and has never pretended to be, a great Xs-and-Os tactician. Play-calling and quarterback development were always someone else’s department. When Elliott left, that department went vacant, and it has stayed vacant — through Streeter, through Riley’s brief success, and now through the return of Morris, whose offense was genuinely ahead of its time in 2011 but is, by definition, no longer new.  Rehiring the same guy to run a version of the same system isn’t a plan so much as an admission that Swinney’s search for the next idea stopped somewhere around 2014.

Imagine being a major program that has won multiple national championships in college football over the past decade and now you are on the hot seat because you have refused to embrace the ever-changing sport and your solution to fix that problem is hiring Chad Morris

— John Nabors (@JohnNaborsShow) December 30, 2025

Which brings us to Week 1 of 2026, which felt like the end of the Dabo Swinney era in Clemson.

Clemson traveled to Baton Rouge to open the season against LSU and lost 51-10 — the worst loss of Swinney’s eighteen seasons and the biggest margin since he took the job in 2008. Christopher Vizzina threw an early pick-six and was benched at halftime for true freshman Tait Reynolds, who didn’t do any better. Clemson finished with 145 total yards to LSU’s 644, didn’t score a touchdown until the final minutes, and averaged 3.0 yards per play.

“We got our asses kicked.”

That loss sits on top of a 7-6 finish in 2025 — Swinney’s worst record since 2010, Clemson’s first losing home record since 1998 — and a preseason unranked, the program’s first since 2011. Paul Finebaum, who’s spent a decade needling Swinney, upgraded from mockery to something closer to a eulogy, calling the program “a shell of itself” and arguing it had been sliding for years while its coach talked about it in the present tense of 2016 and 2018. He wasn’t alone, but he was more right than the people insisting the program was fine. Not everyone agreed — Josh Pate spent the offseason arguing Clemson’s lowered expectations were actually a “sweet spot” — but even Pate had shifted by August to calling Clemson “on the clock,” which in this sport is the polite way of saying the leash has a visible end.

What separates this stretch from every previous rough patch of Swinney’s tenure is that there’s no obvious escape hatch left in the roster. The last two times things wobbled, Deshaun Watson or Trevor Lawrence was on campus, capable of papering over scheme and line problems with talent alone. Uiagalelei wasn’t that guy, and Clemson survived on defense instead. Klubnik was that guy briefly, for one season, and then wasn’t. Vizzina and Reynolds are, at best, competent college quarterbacks stapled to an offensive line that lost four starters and added zero reinforcements. If the line can’t be fixed through recruiting or the portal, no version of this roster fixes itself around it.

Which is where the number that actually runs the clock comes in: $57 million. That’s Swinney’s buyout under his 2022 extension, with no mitigation clause that would reduce it if he took another job the next day. The structure makes right now, perversely, the cheapest year left to move on — the figure rises to $60 million in total compensation owed if the school waits until 2027. That number, not any single Saturday, is the real governor on how fast this changes.

The media vultures didn’t create any of this, and Finebaum in particular has been circling for a specific reason, not just a general one. Back in 2022, well before any of this was visible on a scoreboard, Finebaum tore into Swinney over his public opposition to paying players, calling him “antiquated” and mocking his church-and-family routine as “holier than thou,” and adding that Clemson simply hadn’t figured out how to “gin the system like some others” in the new NIL landscape. At the time, it read like Finebaum being Finebaum, an SEC partisan needling an ACC coach who’d beaten Alabama twice.

But that was then. Four years later, with Clemson no longer among college football’s elite, Swinney only has himself to blame. After all, he fed the birds.

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