What is going on with Dabo Swinney and Clemson?

Every college football fan currently enrolled at a university grew up accustomed to Clemson being a national powerhouse.

From DeShaun Watson’s final-second touchdown pass to win the National Championship to Trevor Lawrence and co.’s domination in the 2018 Championship game, this is a program we have long expected to be great.

However, since the turn of the decade, they have been anything but great.

Since Lawrence left for the NFL in 2021, they have made one Playoff game, in which they were blown out.

Right now, they are sitting at 3-5 and staring down at potentially missing a bowl for the first time since 1998.

After their loss to Duke, Dabo Swinney left the press conference saying he thought he was going to get fired after they lost to South Carolina last November, and that if he did get fired after their fifth loss of the year, he wouldn’t blame athletic director Graham Neff.

While it doesn’t appear he will get fired before the season ends, there have to be questions asked by the Clemson decision makers.

Over the last four years, despite Clemson winning, there has always been the underlying concern of them falling behind the trend in the new NIL era of college sports.

Swinney was always a coach who stuck to what worked for him, such as not using the transfer portal.

This past offseason was the first time he has ever gone shopping in the portal, but there hasn’t been an inspiring show that he can still be one of the elite coaches in college football in this new time in the sport.

He has always strongly defended his ways, such as when a furious fan called into his show with Clemson at 4-4 in 2023, which led to an outburst from Swinney.

This rant inspired a five-game win streak from the Tigers.

They haven’t been able to recapture that feeling.

When facing criticism for this year’s underperformance, he has accepted it rather than fighting back.

What made the previous Clemson teams so special was the culture created.

Every player there committed out of high school, and most coaches were also former players.

This year, that is gone.

They finally went to the portal to get new talent and brought in two outside coordinators alongside other coaches without a connection to the program.

It had led to the Tigers losing that sense of identity that they had, and they’ve shown very disjointed play on both sides of the ball.

After Clemson lost to Georgia Tech to fall to 1-3, a former Clemson running back and now podcaster said that the most disappointing possibility would be if the team just lay down and died, which would be so unlike the teams he knew from the past.

A month later, that was exactly what they did. Two losses in a row have ended their hopes of anything major this season, and now they’ll be fighting to even make a bowl.

Whether Dabo Swinney can get Clemson back on track remains to be seen. However, it certainly can’t be a good feeling down in Death Valley to see how they look in 2025 compared to years past.

Edison Pellumbi is a first-year student studying broadcast journalism. To contact him, email him at ejp5889@psu.edu.