Why I Root for Dabo Swinney

I’m not a Clemson fan. But in a college football world that increasingly feels transactional, I find myself rooting for the guy who still believes it can be something more.

I am not a Clemson fan. Hell, I have never even been to Clemson. That’s my fault. I really need to go.

But I have to admit something: watching Clemson fall apart last season was hard for me.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

Clemson entered 2025 ranked No. 4 in the country. They received four first-place votes in the preseason AP poll. On our show, Rick Neuheisel picked the Tigers to win the national championship.

Instead, Clemson finished 7–6, its worst season since 2010. A program that had become synonymous with January football was suddenly just trying to get through December. And now, as we enter 2026, Clemson is unranked in the preseason AP poll for the first time since 2011.

The craziest part?

The talent was there.

Nine Clemson players were selected in the 2026 NFL Draft, tying the school record for a seven-round draft. All nine were selected in the first five rounds. Two went in the first round. Five were gone within the first 75 picks.

Nine NFL Draft picks.

Seven wins. How does that happen? And now Dabo Swinney feels almost like a relic from another era.

A man who was great at something, only to watch the thing he mastered change so rapidly underneath him that eventually the tide swallowed him up.

I write that in pain. Because I hate it. I want Dabo to win.

I want him competing for championships. I want Clemson in December and January. I want him standing on a stage with confetti falling around him again.

Because I believe Dabo Swinney is one of the good guys on this earth.

Different people can still recognize goodness

I suspect if Dabo and I sat down for a few hours, we probably wouldn’t agree on everything.

Maybe not politics. Maybe not religion. Maybe not our interpretation of the meaning of life.

Or maybe we would agree on more than I think. Who knows?

He grew up in Alabama. I grew up in suburban Chicago. We came from different places and had different experiences.

That’s okay.

Actually, I love that.

Human beings are wonderfully different. We have different beliefs, personalities, wants, fears and ways of looking at the world. One of the great joys of being alive is trying, even imperfectly, to see the world through somebody else’s eyes.

And that’s part of what I’ve always appreciated about Dabo.

You know what he believes.

More importantly, he appears to live it.

Dabo loves football. He loves coaching young people. He loves Jesus Christ and is unapologetic about his faith.

That’s Dabo.

He walks the walk and talks the talk.

You don’t have to share someone’s theology to recognize when their faith appears to produce kindness, generosity and genuine concern for other people.

I root for that.

I choose to root for that.

This isn’t some ordinary football coach

And before we bury Dabo as some old coach who couldn’t adapt, maybe we should remember what the man actually accomplished.

Entering 2026, Swinney is 187–53 as Clemson’s head coach.

He has won two national championships.

He has won nine ACC championships.

He passed Frank Howard to become the winningest head coach in Clemson history. He also passed Bobby Bowden for the most career head-coaching victories earned as a member of the ACC.

Since his first full season in 2009, Dabo has accumulated 11 combined conference and national championship rings.

He went 2–1 against Nick Saban in national championship games.

And despite all the jokes people make about Clemson’s development now, Swinney has produced 95 NFL Draft picks plus a supplemental selection during his head-coaching tenure. That’s the most draft selections produced by any active coach since the 2009 NFL Draft. Twenty of those players became first-round picks.

That isn’t a nice little run.

That’s one of the great coaching careers of this generation. As we like to say on Full Ride, that’s Hall-of-Fame stuff and then some!

And he did it at Clemson.

Before Dabo, Clemson had history. It had tradition. It had a national championship.

Dabo turned Clemson into an empire.

And then the sport changed

This is the part that hurts me. Because Dabo believed in a version of college football that is rapidly disappearing. He resisted the transfer portal.

He wanted Clemson players to be Clemson players. Recruit them. Develop them. Coach them. Watch them struggle. Watch them grow. I looked in his eyes two years ago at ACC media days, and he was just so passionate about the kids.

Watch a bunch of 18-year-olds become 22-year-old men together.

Build relationships that survive long after anybody remembers the score of the Florida State game.

Guys who someday stand in each other’s weddings. Guys who call one another when their parents die.

Guys who return to campus 20 years later and don’t talk about their NIL valuation or their portal recruitment. They talk about the locker room. The road trips. The coaches. The stupid things they did together when they were 19.

That sounds hopelessly romantic now. Maybe it is.

But damn it, college football was romantic. That was the whole point. And modern college football has become increasingly transactional.

Who can pay?

Who can offer the opportunity? Who needs a quarterback? Who needs a tackle? Who’s available? What’s the number?

Let’s make a deal.

I understand why players take the money. I don’t blame them. I understand why coaches use the portal. I don’t blame them either.

If Clemson loses because another program has better players, nobody is going to give Dabo extra credit because he built his roster according to his principles.

That’s the uncomfortable truth.

But there is still something deeply sad about watching a man fight to preserve something he genuinely believes is worth preserving — and watching the sport tell him that those beliefs may no longer be competitive advantages.

College football was supposed to do something for people

That’s where this becomes bigger than football for me.

Because the best version of college athletics was never supposed to exist merely to manufacture NFL players.

Most college football players aren’t going to the NFL. They need something else from the experience. Structure. Guidance. Friendship. Discipline. Love.

And, most importantly, an education.

College football could take an 18-year-old kid and give him four years of people investing in him. Coaches. Professors. Teammates. Trainers. Tutors. Administrators. It could send him into adulthood better prepared than when he arrived.

That’s what Dabo has always seemed to believe this whole enterprise is supposed to be about.

And maybe that’s why something I saw from Clemson recently hit me so hard.

ClemsonLIFE

I watched a video from Clemson on Instagram the other day that brought me to tears.

It involved ClemsonLIFE — Learning Is For Everyone.

ClemsonLIFE is a four-year postsecondary program for young adults with intellectual disabilities. Its mission is to give those students a genuine collegiate experience while preparing them for employment and independent living. I mean honestly, GO CLEMSON!

This isn’t ceremonial inclusion.

Students learn functional academics, banking and budgeting, independent-living skills, self-advocacy, health and wellness and employment skills. They participate in internships and supervised job placements.

Students live in apartments and learn how to manage schedules, transportation, grocery shopping and the everyday responsibilities of adulthood.

Each ClemsonLIFE student is also paired with a Clemson peer mentor who helps them academically and socially and, importantly, helps integrate them into the broader campus community.

Think about what that means.

For a young person with an intellectual disability — and for that person’s parents — Clemson isn’t simply offering a class. Basketball legend and Show Pony Media subscriber Debbie Antonelli’s son, Frankie, is a graduate of the program. In past interviews on Sirius XM, she raved about the program’s virtues.

It’s offering possibility. Independence. Community. Belonging.

A chance to experience something their family may once have wondered whether they would ever get to experience.

And then I watched Clemson’s Bid Day.

There were young women from ClemsonLIFE experiencing that same explosion of joy and acceptance that surrounds one of the biggest days in sorority life.

The screaming. The hugs. The signs. The excitement. The feeling that someone is waiting for you to run home.

Clemson’s official description of Bid Day says students open their bids together and then “run home” to their new chapter to celebrate.

Watching young women with intellectual disabilities get to experience that sense of belonging absolutely wrecked me. Because that’s what college is supposed to be. That’s what community is supposed to be.

That’s what sports, at their absolute best, are supposed to represent.

You belong here. Because you’re one of us. That was beautiful. That was Clemson.

How did we get here?

And this is where my sadness about Dabo becomes sadness about the sport.

College athletics brought much of this upon itself.

For decades, television revenue exploded. Coaching salaries exploded. Conference distributions exploded. Facilities became palaces.

Everyone seemed allowed to participate in the growing economy surrounding college sports except the athletes actually producing the product.

The NCAA had opportunities to modernize.

It didn’t.

Then came NCAA v. Alston.

On June 21, 2021, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against the NCAA in its attempt to restrict certain education-related benefits available to athletes. The case itself was narrower than the revolution that followed — it did not simply abolish all NCAA compensation restrictions — but the message was unmistakable: the NCAA could not simply assume that its compensation rules were exempt from normal antitrust scrutiny.

The dam started breaking.

And once it broke, college sports didn’t gradually modernize. It sprinted into an entirely new world. NIL. Revenue sharing. Collectives. The portal. Agents. Roster management. Contracts. Market value. Free agency without calling it free agency. Some of this was overdue. Players deserved more.

I’ve believed that for years.

But acknowledging that doesn’t mean we have to pretend nothing valuable was lost along the way.

Two things can be true at once.

The old system was unfair to athletes.

And the new system has stripped away some of what made college sports uniquely beautiful. That’s the conflict I can’t get past.

And then there’s the irony of the opener

Maybe college football has a sense of humor. Because Clemson doesn’t get to ease into this season.

Dabo Swinney’s first game of 2026 will be at LSU, at night, in Death Valley.

And standing on the opposite sideline will be Lane Kiffin.

You almost couldn’t script a better representation of the two competing visions of modern college football.

Dabo versus Lane.

And I don’t mean that as a personal attack on Kiffin. I think Lane is a brilliant football coach. He’s entertaining. He’s smart. He’s figured out exactly how the modern game works. Good on him, I guess.

However, Kiffin left Ole Miss after building arguably the best team in school history and headed to an SEC rival. It was super ugly, clunky and messy. The people of Oxford hate him now with a passion.

To me, Kiffin is the anti-Dabo. The guy with no loyalty, where winning is all that matters.

Maybe Dabo will prove us all wrong

I don’t know what happens next. Maybe Dabo figures this all out. I hope they are a playoff team this year and last year is forgotten.

Because there is something about Dabo Swinney that I don’t want college football to lose.

The sincerity. The loyalty.

The belief that coaching is about more than accumulating talent. The idea that the people inside your building aren’t interchangeable assets.

The belief that a football program can actually be a community. I know how corny that sounds in 2026.

I don’t care. There should still be room in college football for somebody who believes that. There should still be room for the romantic.

There should still be room for relationships that aren’t entirely transactional.

There should still be room for a coach who looks at the young men in his locker room and sees more than a depth chart and a salary-cap calculation.

So, no, I’m not a Clemson fan.

I’ve never been to Clemson.

But when the Tigers take the field this fall, I’ll be rooting for them more than I probably should.

I’ll be rooting for Dabo. Not because I think he’s been right about everything. Not because refusing to change is inherently noble. And certainly not because I want athletes to return to a system that denied them a fair share of the enormous business they helped create.

I’ll root for him because I want to believe there is still a place in this sport for what he represents at his best.

Development. Loyalty. Faith. Community. Love. Belonging. Maybe that’s hopelessly old-fashioned. Maybe Dabo is a relic.

But sometimes relics remind us of things we shouldn’t have thrown away.

And I don’t want college football to throw all of this away.