Swinney: "There'll be another national championship or two coming" for young group

The Tigers celebrate Will Shipley's touchdown. (Photo by Merrell Mann).

by David Hood - Senior Writer - Sat Sep 23 19:38:28 GMT-04:00 2023

CLEMSON – Head coach Dabo Swinney doesn’t put much stock in what Saturday’s loss means about the future of the ACC or the Clemson program. It’s just one game in a long season.

Florida State defeated Clemson 31-24 in overtime Saturday afternoon to improve to 2-0 in ACC play, while Clemson falls to 0-2. The Tigers are now on the outside looking in when it comes to playing for an ACC Championship, but Swinney used part of his postgame press conference to remind everyone that it was just one game.

“Oh, man, it's just one day. It's hard to beat somebody eight times in a row. They won the day,” Swinney said of Florida St. “They won the game. I mean, they won today. What does that mean? It means they may go on and win the ACC this year. We're not entitled to win the ACC every year. We didn't win it in '21. A lot of you all said we were done. We came back and won it last year. I think that we won it last year. We lost in overtime to a great team -- a team that may go on and win the whole thing.

“You give them a lot of credit for that. We don't sit around and act like we are the top of anything. We just try to compete and show up and do our best to represent this university with class. We've won a bunch of them. Today, it wasn't our day. But man, I give them credit. They've done a great job. I don't look at it as a what? A referendum? I don't even know what that means. I don't look at it like that. I just think we lost a game.”

Swinney said he sees promise in his program and that he thinks the Tigers are going to win another National Championship with players on the current roster.

“We’ve got a lot of young talent on this team and a bunch of guys that are going to be around here for a while. They’re going to be in a bunch of big games,” Swinney said. “We have a bunch of guys that'll win a championship. There'll be another national championship or two coming. What you learn is it's one or two plays in games like this. It's one or two plays. When you're playing games like this, it's one or two plays. Simple as that. We've won a bunch of these where you can say that play, and we've lost some along the way where you can say this play or this play.

“Two really evenly matched teams, two great teams, that game could have been won by either. Again, we never even trailed in the game (in regulation). But we had the critical mistake. Then obviously, it's all about the ball. Thirty-six points off the turnovers - just process that in four games. All of last year was 38. That's why we're 2-2. We have a good team. We got a bunch of young, again, bunch of talented guys that really, really care.”

The Tigers don’t have time to sulk – they travel to Syracuse for a noon game against the Orange next weekend.

“I hurt for them. I really do. I hurt for them because they work incredibly hard, and they fought to win all the way, but we didn't,” Swinney said. “We have to just keep moving forward. We have an opportunity to pick yourself up. You learn a lot through adversity. I wish that we never lost a game, ever. I wish that was the case. I wish we won every time. I don't know that you learn a lot from that, but you hate it when it doesn't go your way.

“You hate it when you lose. When you're a competitor, you hate adversity, so you just keep going. But for me, listen, I know as a person of faith that sometimes things happen we don't understand. You just got to know where the world puts a period and an exclamation point, God puts a comma. Just keep moving forward. We're not promised that nothing ever is going to bad is going to happen or something's not going to go your way. But if you're a true competitor and you're a champion, you learn, you pick yourself up, and you go back to work, and you focus on what you control, and you give credit to who your opponent is, and you move forward.”