Clemson returns to playoff: Tip your cap to over-believer Dabo Swinney

One of Dabo Swinney’s most important qualities is he’s never afraid to be laughed out of a room. 

Rewind to 2013. It was a few days after Clemson had played Florida State in a huge prime-time matchup. The Seminoles were on their way to a national championship. Swinney’s program was stuck in the Same Ol’ Clemson/Clemsoning era where it seemed like it just couldn’t get over the hump when it mattered. 

And Swinney’s assessment of a game in which his team had just lost 51-14? If they played 10 times, “We’d probably win five, they’d probably win five.” 

It was a crazy thing to say in the wake of such an epic beatdown, but it was pure Swinney: Defiant to the point of mockery, optimistic to the point of absurdity and unyielding to the point of irrationality. There’s a reason why Swinney, the old Alabama walk-on who grew up and made good, has always preferred to be called an over-believer instead of an overachiever. 

“I’ve been taking shots since I got this job. What’s changed?” he said this week. “I’ve been taking shots for 16 years and we just keep winning.”

Swinney won’t exactly get the last laugh this season unless Clemson pulls off the unthinkable, starting with Saturday afternoon’s first-round College Football Playoff game at Texas.

According to the oddsmakers, Clemson is the biggest underdog of the weekend. Had the Tigers not held on to beat SMU in the ACC championship game — winning it with a 56-yard field goal at the buzzer — they would have missed the CFP for a fourth consecutive year. As crazy as it seems after Swinney became a playoff staple, making six consecutive appearances with two national titles, this is the first time that nearly all of Clemson’s roster has been involved in a game of such magnitude. 

“It’s a big accomplishment for them,” Swinney said. 

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But it’s also a big accomplishment for Swinney, whose work over the last four seasons has been the subject of harsh criticism externally and even within Clemson’s fan base. A little more than a year ago, Swinney snapped at a caller to his coaches’ show — Tyler from Spartanburg — who suggested that Swinney wasn’t living up to his $11.5 million salary. 

“I used to tell people all the time, what’s the difference in Clemson? At some places there’s an expectation, but at Clemson there’s an appreciation,’ he said during that famous five-minute rant. ‘And what’s happened at Clemson is we’ve won so much that even when — it used to be the fun’s in the winning. Now even when you win, people like you complain and criticize the coaches and question everything. It’s people like you, all right?”

Swinney’s defensiveness was no surprise.

When the entire world thought he was crazy 11 years ago for saying that Clemson was right on the heels of a Florida State team that had just beaten him by 37 points, all he did was win eight of the next 10 matchups with the Seminoles and hoist eight ACC championship trophies to FSU’s three. 

When Clemson finally reached the playoff, few thought Swinney had the chops to beat Nick Saban. Instead, the Tigers took down Alabama twice in the national championship game, including a 44-16 destruction to finish off a perfect 15-0 season.

And when many around the sport were questioning whether Swinney’s stubbornness was getting the best of him as college football rapidly evolved into a sport where players can get paid and transfer freely between programs, here’s Clemson back in the playoff. Back where Swinney believes they belong. 

“We just had our 10th win for the 13th time in 14 years and our seventh CFP and even with all that people still want me to be like everybody else,” he said after the ACC championship game.

“We’ve won on the highest stage against the best of the best and, you know, we’re at a point now where we don’t win a championship and we’ve got to fire everybody and it’s the same old tired narratives that come up every single year when we lose a game. … All we hear is how bad we are and how terrible we are and how stupid I am and whatever and we just keep winning.”

You have to tip your cap to Swinney because this Clemson team, for most of the season, did not seem to be a playoff-quality outfit. 

Georgia completely flattened the Tigers in the season opener 34-3. They were flat as a pancake in a 33-21 loss at home to Louisville. And by the end of the regular season, they weren’t even the best team in South Carolina as the Gamecocks won the in-state battle for the second time in three years. 

The evidence is clear: Clemson, while still winning a lot of games, has slipped from the upper tier of college football. And it has slipped for a variety of reasons.

After a phenomenal run of putting players like DeAndre Hopkins, Sammy Watkins, Artavis Scott, Hunter Renfrow, Tee Higgins, Mike Williams and others into the NFL, it’s been awhile since Clemson could claim the ‘Wide Receiver U” moniker. Its quarterbacks have largely not lived up to their recruiting hype. After keeping their coaching staff together longer than most successful programs, Swinney finally had to deal with a brain drain.

And while Clemson’s rivals were filling roster holes with transfers, Swinney did not really use the portal at all, preferring to rely on the internal development of players he recruited out of high school. 

That hasn’t necessarily been a great bet. When the transfer portal only goes one way — out the door — it’s not easy to maintain the program the same way he could a decade ago. 

But there are signs that Swinney’s approach is changing just a bit. This week alone, Clemson has signed receiver Tristan Smith out of Southeast Missouri and Will Heldt, a big-time pass rusher from Purdue.

They are literally the first two players Swinney has taken out of the portal who weren’t backup quarterbacks. And it suggests that Swinney, who is just 55 years old, isn’t going to glide off into retirement ranting about how the modern game chased him away. 

That’s a good thing. As frustrating and rigid and hypocritical as Swinney can sometimes seem — he once railed against the professionalization of college sports, only to see his salary grow every year — it would be better for the sport if he adapted and made one more run with Little Old Clemson. Like him or not, Swinney is always great content. 

“Anything can happen,” he said before the ACC championship. ‘I think we were the first 15-0 national championship team, maybe we could be the first three-loss team. Boy, that would upset some people. God, y’all would have to take a bunch of stuff back that y’all say every day. That would really disappoint some people, but why not?”

It sounds ridiculous now, but it’s not the first time. As Dabo has shown again and again, you can’t prove it unless you say it.