Dabo Swinney’s getting better as a coach according to ESPN analyst

This wasn’t the end of season celebration Clemson had come used to, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t an impressive coaching job.

by David Hood - Senior Writer - Wed Jul 06 08:00:05 GMT-04:00 2022

Dabo Swinney is a better coach now than he was a few short years ago, and that’s saying something for someone who has already won two National Championships.

Shortly after Clemson defeated Ohio St. 29-23 to win a nailbiter of a Fiesta Bowl in late December of 2019, another football coach I know sent me a message that said he thought was the best coaching job he had seen out of head coach Dabo Swinney and his assistants. He said that Clemson was out-coached through much of the first half, but regrouped and made enough correct adjustments to pull out the win.

I got another one from him at the end of last season and he said pretty much the same thing, except instead of it being the best coaching job for one game, it covered an entire season. It turns out that ESPN college football analyst Tom Luginbill agrees with that assessment.

“For me, I think it was the best coaching job that Dabo Swinney and his coaching staff have done since he’s been at Clemson, to right that ship, to not allow things to go in the tank, not allow things to snowball downhill,” Luginbill said on Packer and Durham recently.

To recap – the Tigers ended the season with a 20-13 victory over Iowa St. in the Cheez-It Bowl, earning the program’s 10th win. That 10th victory allowed Clemson to become only the third program in history ever to post 11 consecutive 10-win seasons, joining Florida State (14 from 1987-2000) and Alabama (14 from 2008-21).

Clemson did all of that despite major injuries on both sides of the ball – 30 scholarship players missed the bowl – and with other players transferring out during the season. However, none of the Tigers’ players opted out of the bowl, regardless of draft status.

Swinney himself pointed out that the Tigers ended September with a 2-2 record, and he entered a team meeting on Oct. 1 with a list of over 30 teams that had two losses. Only two teams on that list finished with nine wins – Utah and Clemson.

"You are sitting there at 2-2 in September with a lot of disappointment, a lot of negativity, a lot of noise," Swinney said. "And you really saw the foundation of our program shine and win the day. I'm just really proud of how it's come together and how these guys have stayed together and gotten better and better."

Luginbill said it would have been easy for the program to “cower” and run away.

“I look at Clemson, because Clemson a year ago took so much public heat because for the first time in a long time, things weren’t going well,” Luginbill said. “The quarterback was going down a path that was not good — wasn’t accurate, couldn’t get the ball downfield. And then you have opt-outs, you have injuries, and they start off and for the first time in gosh, I don’t know how long, they actually had to face some adversity and some criticism.

“When you’re going through that and you’ve had such a run where you haven’t had a lot of that – you haven’t had a lot of criticism, internally and externally, you haven’t had a lot of injuries, you haven’t had things that can seep into your locker room and your building as a negative – when you experience that and you haven’t, what’s the first thing that a lot of people do? They would fold. They would cower, they’d find a way to make excuses, because they don’t know how to respond to it. This team did the exact opposite.”

Luginbill pointed to NC State’s team in 2019, a team that suffered major injuries, as one that could compare to what the Tigers went through last season. That Wolfpack team, however, finished 4-8.

“It would have been three years ago, the season prior to the COVID year when they had all of those injuries,” Luginbill said of NC State. “And the next thing you know, all those guys that had to play that shouldn’t have, and all of the depth that was established. You look at that now, and that’s why NC State is being thought of the way they’re being thought of.

“Well, the exact same thing happened to Clemson a year ago. Clemson had, especially on offense, ended up playing with a bunch of guys they weren’t anticipating playing with. Now, it might not have been ideal at the time. By the time you got to the end of the year and now you’ve got an offseason, Clemson knows a lot more about their football team and their roster and what they have. Because of that, that’s going to help them I think transfer that over into this fall.”