Clemson HC Dabo Swinney Sounds Off on Officiating, Believing 'System Needs to Change'

The Clemson Tigers saw a frustrating call to end their loss against the Duke Blue Devils on a low note, but head coach Dabo Swinney is continuing to hold all officials accountable for all calls.

Even after Swinney was given a public reprimand and Clemson was fined $10,000 on Sunday for the comments made following the game, the head coach is doubling down on his thoughts on officiating, especially in the changing landscape of college football nowadays.

With how coaches and players are becoming more and more prone to fans and media saying criticisms on social media, Swinney wants the officials to have the same type of accountability.

“In this profession, coaches get crucified, fined. Players get crucified, held to this unrealistic accountability standard, but refs have zero accountability,” he said on Tuesday. “Well, they do, but it’s behind a curtain. They get to go home and drink a beer and, you know, get on with their life and just leave the carnage left behind that affects a lot of people, people losing jobs.”

Money will continue to pour into the college football landscape, which leads Swinney to his solution to fixing this type of issue. With how the NFL does it, officials work full-time jobs, while college football referees only work part-time.

So, that solution? Make these officials work full-time under one umbrella.

“That system needs to change,” Swinney said. There should be, first of all, with what’s at stake and what’s going on, like the NFL, they’re not part-time refs, like they need to be full-time refs, and it needs to be a job, and there should be one leader and one voice.

That’s what it should be, number one, and then there should be public accountability. Period,” he continued. “Like, you can’t criticize them, but they’re on the field, they’re in the arena, but they’re the only ones in the arena that have no consequences, publicly. Or, God forbid, you get to pay a fine because you criticize performance, but yet, everybody else can be criticized. It’s a bad system, the way it’s set up, and there needs to be some change.”

It’s not like the criticism doesn’t happen; it simply occurs privately “behind the curtain”, which Swinney alluded to several times throughout his monologue.

Especially in a 12-team College Football Playoff now, teams have much more to play for during the season. Instead of three or four weeks into a season, games will matter until November for many teams, making the scrutiny of these calls even more important to keep a team in playoff contention.

While Clemson is not there this season, Swinney says that other teams will have coaches and assistants fired throughout the season, sometimes happening from events like what occurred at Memorial Stadium in the fourth quarter.

“There needs to be the ability to review egregious calls in certain situations because it means people are losing jobs, whether it’s assistants or head coaches or players,” he said, “and how they get crucified on social media and things like that, like it’s impactful.”

Swinney understands the pressure of being a head coach and feels with his players when they are criticized. However, he wants to make sure that the other people who are on the field are held accountable visibly, saying that “they ought to have an answer for it.”

“It ain’t just the coaches and players, and if they’re a part of the game, then by God, they ought to be a part of the game,” Swinney said. “And they ought to be a part of the accountability, and they ought to be a part of the consequences, not just behind some shadowy curtain.”