Inside the Numbers: Where Could Swinney Rank Among Coaches After This Decade?
Clemson football is coming off the greatest decade in program history.
The Tigers had just one season (2010) in which they won fewer than 10 games. They went to the final five College Football Playoffs of the 2010s and captured two national titles (2016,2018).
Meanwhile, Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney soared up the list of game’s winningest coaches, earning 117 victories during the decade. That’s with his lone losing season (6-7) that changed the direction of the program for the better.
Currently, Swinney is tied with former Oregon and Kentucky coach Rich Brooks for 99th all-time in FBS wins. There are 10 active coaches with more victories: Nick Saban, Mack Brown, Gary Patterson, Frank Solich, Kirk Ferentz, Rocky Long, Brian Kelly, Les Miles, Mike Leach and Kyle Whittingham.
Three of them (Saban, Brown and Miles) join Swinney has national championship winners.
Among all college football coaches of any level, Swinney’s 80.7 winning percentage puts him in a category with 41 others to have won at least 80 percent of their games.
To add to that impressive number, Swinney won just 55.8 percent of his games during his first three seasons at the helm. Starting in 2011, he’s won an incredible 87.4 percent of the time. That number alone would rank him third all-time in the game.
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At 50 years old, Swinney is in the prime of his coaching career and has shown no signs of slowing down at Clemson, which is now a perennial power and mentioned in the same circles with Alabama and Ohio State as the top programs in the country.
So what happens if Clemson continues its current course? What will this new decade bring and where will Swinney end up 10 years from now?
To answer those questions, you have to assume Clemson’s dominance of the second half of the last decade continues to a large degree.
Clemson won 111 games from 2011-2019, an average of 12.3 victories per season. Overall, the Tigers won 11.7 percent of their games for the entire decade. That might be a good starting position to build projections so a bad season or a couple less than 10-win campaigns are built into the numbers.
So just if Clemson were to repeat that trend and get Swinney to 117 wins in this new decade, he would vault into the 200-win milestone potentially by 2026. Eighteen major-college coaches in the game's history have reached the 200-win plateau.
He could have 247 career-wins by the end of 2029, making him one of the dozen most winningest coaches ever.
Over the course of the next 10 seasons, Swinney should pass the likes of John Heisman, Barry Switzer, Dan Divine, John Vaught and Bob Stoops.
Once he crosses 200 victories, he’ll be among greats like Vince Dooley, Bill Snyder, Steve Spurrier and Bo Schembechler, who are all in the top 20 all-time in wins.
Saban, the winningest most active coach, has 248 career victories, which puts him ninth all-time. Brown, who took a 6-year hiatus after he left Texas in 2013, has three fewer wins than Saban.
Those two will stay in the top-10, but Swinney could potentially join them.
There are some caveats that could change these figures and projections. No one knows exactly what the 2020 season will look like because of COVID-19. The Tigers might not play a full 12-game regular-season schedule, which would change Swinney’s ceiling when it comes to average wins per season.
He could also leave at some point this decade. Swinney has been rumored with NFL jobs, although there doesn’t seem to be much draw for him to test his philosophies at the pro level.
He could also take another college job, which seems unlikely right now. Saban (68) likely won’t be at Alabama by the end of his decade, and of course, that’s Swinney’s alma mater and where he got his coaching start. It’ll be wildly entertaining to see what the Crimson Tide do when Saban retires, but Swinney being his replacement is simply speculation. Obviously he would have a chance at Alabama to win in a similar fashion that he is at Clemson, so the wins and percentages could still climb.
There’s also the possibility of things going awry for one way or another, but again, there are no signs that Swinney won’t be walking the sidelines in Death Valley for a long time.
Even if that 11.7 wins per season isn’t obtainable for another decade, Clemson is still set up to win enough games for him to continue to climb the list, and job security couldn’t be greater. One element that could add more games to the win is an expanded CFP.
If the previous decade's wins per year hold, 10 years from now, we’re talking about a coach at 60 years old who would be among the top-10 FBS coaches of all-time in wins and would have a shot at moving even higher in the 2030s.
By the way, Paul “Bear” Bryant, the Alabama legend who epitomizes winning for Swinney, has 323 career victories, well in reach for Swinney to chase if his career stays on its current path.
