Why Dabo Swinney Continues to Remain Himself in Changing College Football Landscape

Since 2021, there hasn’t been a sport that hasn’t changed like college football has over the last five years. However, there’s one thing that has remained stable in the heart of it all.

That’s Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney.

He spoke about his consistency within the program to college football analyst Adam Breneman on his podcast “Next Up with Adam Breneman.” Swinney says the program has remained in contention for championships because what’s remained the most important values of the program haven’t changed.

And his players remain bought in at all times.

“Graduation, equipping them as men, making sure they have a college experience and I want everybody who comes to Clemson to win a championship,” Swinney said. “That’s our purpose.”

“We’ve had to change many things, but rules have changed,” he said. “So, we’ve had to change a lot of things over the years, but out core values don’t change. Our purpose doesn’t change.”

Since he was approved to be the Tigers’ head coach in 2009, his program has been “all driven by conviction”, and that trickles down into his coaching staff and players. For Swinney’s first objective, graduation, his players are bought into the classroom.

Out of 430 seniors that the Clemson head coach has had over his 16 seasons, 424 have received a diploma at graduation, being the best in the country in college football’s graduation rate. Not to mention, the Tigers still win games, and a lot of them too.

“I mean, we’ve had COVID, we’ve had NIL, we’ve had portal, we’ve had zero enforcement on stuff,” Swinney said. “It’s been crazy, but yet, we’ve still won, and we’ve won big and 17 years later, we have purpose-driven results.”

That comes to this past season, a year where Swinney’s group finished with a 7-6 record despite coming in as one of the top teams in the country. Similar to other times he’s been asked about the down year, he looks at the bigger picture rather than a season that he saw losses “only being a few plays away” from winning.

Especially with the role of social media in today’s game, the Clemson head coach thinks it’s taken away from how great teams can be in the long-term.

“All the predictions, all these things that people like to say, hating is a sport today,” he said. “All these things, hating on Clemson, Clemson can’t do this, Clemson can’t do that, or all the things that Clemson hadn’t done in 100 years, whatever.

Before our tenure, we hadn’t won the ACC in 20 years, and it wasn’t a 17-team league, Swinney continued. ”We hadn’t won 10 games in 20 years.”

He will continue to remain the same, and if that’s how the landscape will look to view him, that won’t change anything. Swinney will show his loaded trophy case as his rebuttal.

“We’ve done the common things in an uncommon way,” he said, “and that’s how we’ve commanded the attention of the world.”

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