Hang on Amari, Players Want Coaches to Yell?

It was nearly four weeks ago that Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney was ripped apart by the national media for doing the unthinkable—he yelled at a player.

CLEMSON—It was nearly four weeks ago that Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney was ripped apart by the national media for doing the unthinkable—he yelled at a player.

The aforementioned eighth deadly sin occurred when placekicker B.T. Potter missed a 24-yard field goal. His second miss in a row after a 40-yard miss in the Tigers' one-point win at North Carolina.

Swinney expressed his displeasure with Potter by yelling at him on the sidelines, a scene that was caught by television cameras.

That was when the outrage happened, first on Twitter by armchair quarterbacks who's college football experience probably stopped with the release of EA Sports' NCAA Football '14 video game.

Almost as fast came the news reports with titles like "Dabo Swinney Erupts Following Clemson Missed Field Goal', "Dabo Swinney Ripped Clemson’s Kicker, Then Got Destroyed for It" and "DABO SWINNEY GOES BONKERS, MERCILESSLY RIPS INTO KICKER FOR MISS UP 28-0 [sic]."

"That's part of coaching," Swinney said. "You have to know when to love them and win to chew them. They all need both. They all get both here. Every single one of them. Ask Deshaun Watson if I ever chewed his butt. Ask Travis Etienne. It took awhile before I yelled at Trevor. I was so excited when I got the chance to yell at him. He didn't give us an opportunity for awhile. 

"I didn't have timeout in my house. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But we didn't have that. Swinney boys didn't have that. In a world like we're in, we have a bunch of men and it's competitive. Iron sharpens iron. If you watch that, sparks fly. It's part of the world that we live in." 

But how do the players actually feel about having a coach yell at them in front of 85,000 fans? How do they feel about being embarrassed in front of opposing fans?

Actually, because they are football players playing the game in real life and playing a video game in their mom's basement, they embrace it. Not only do they embrace it—they want it.

"Yeah, it’s great. You don’t want a coach that is going to be soft on you or easy all the time,” Rodgers said. “You want a coach that’s going to be tough on you and that’s going to coach you. If you’re not being coached, then he doesn’t care about you. If you’re being coached that means he cares and wants to see do well.

“Us players want to be coached and yell at if we do something wrong. If we don’t know, we will keep messing up. We can’t fix it if we aren’t coached. We grow from it and appreciate it.”

That yelling episode may have sparked something not just in B.T. Potter, who subsequently won the starting job back the following week, but in the Tigers as a whole—who have been on an offensive tear the last four games that is historic in nature. 

“Coach Swinney definitely challenged us...we didn’t play well,” Rodgers said. “I feel like it’s in the back of our minds. At the end of the day, we just have to do what we do at home or on the road. We prepare the right way in practice. If we go out there and play mistake free and make big plays, I feel like we are going to be just fine.”