Dabo's Buyout

Sep 13, 2025, 4:42 PM

$60 million currently, $57 million in 2026. Regardless of how folks feel, or even if Neff / Clements wanted to move on, that's not financially feasible for Clemson.

So the reality is Dabo will remain our HC for the foreseeable future. At his core, Dabo has always been a recruiter and motivator, not an X's and O's guy. And I think he can still do those things at a decent enough level for the program to have moderate success.

The problems lately seem to be our coaching staff does a horrendous job coming up with a gameplan/scheme, making in-game adjustments, preparing the players each week for our matchups, and developing players over their tenure. Whether improving on that requires new position coaches, coordinators, or all of the above, those changes are what I think Neff should be pushing Dabo to do. Whether he has the balls to do it is a different question.

With Riley specifically, it's clear in hindsight that he's not cutting it. But at the time he was coming off a year where he won the national award for best assistant coach in the country. So I'm not sure how much we can fault the decision. The question now is how much longer are we going to stick with this failed experiment...

Last, on the transfer portal, folks here seem to think if Dabo embraced it more we'd suddenly have dozens of impact players walking into Clemson that would solve all our problems. The reality is that Clemson (both due to its size, alumni base, and lower revenue ACC TV contract) simply does not have the money to go toe to toe in bidding wars with programs like Ohio State, Texas A&M, etc. to get the best players out of the portal each year. Could we use it more, sure. But I don't think it's the silver bullet solution here.

Overall, I don't see a quick and easy solution to return Clemson to college football's elite. The only real solution seems to be a re-setting of expectations. The biggest disappointment right now seems to be the difference between the expectations for this season and reality. If Dabo wasn't telling reporters pre-season that he thought this could be the first 16-0 college football team, and ESPN wasn't predicting us to be a national title contender, the 1-2 start would be a lot less painful. The new reality is just that Clemson has become an average football program, and it's unlikely there's going to be any short term fix that changes that.