Clemson\u2019s 34-21 loss to Syracuse<\/a> on Saturday, would anyone be particularly upset?<\/p>\nIt\u2019s really that bad at Clemson right now.<\/p>\n
Not only is this a 1-3 football team that dumped a bucket of ice on top of its overheated preseason expectations, it\u2019s even worse because this was supposed to be the year Clemson had built toward. After several years where the talent level was clearly down a tick from the national championship teams, the experts spent all summer telling us Clemson was loaded on defense and finally had more playmakers on offense to help senior quarterback Cade Klubnik make the leap to the top of the NFL Draft.<\/p>\n
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And now it\u2019s all gone bust.<\/p>\n
The interesting thing is, most Clemson fans have not wanted Swinney to be fired. They understand the wilderness their program wandered through in the 1990s and early 2000s, and they understand how he got them to the top of the mountain with his unique energy and will.<\/p>\n
What they want is for him to be different, to adapt to a sport that has changed all around him and to admit that what you\u2019ve accomplished in the past is not a defense for where you\u2019re failing now.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s where Swinney has completely lost the plot.<\/p>\n
In his infamous press conference last week, Swinney\u2019s defiance was not rooted in selling a plan to fix what\u2019s broken or vowing to make the kinds of philosophical changes that would get Clemson back to where it was from 2015-2020.<\/p>\n
Instead, what he offered fans was the energy of a college student who can\u2019t stop talking about that time they were the high school valedictorian while they\u2019re putting a whole bunch of C\u2019s on the report card.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWhat\u2019s so bad about our program?\u201d he whined. \u201cIf we stink because we haven\u2019t played for the national championship since January of \u201920, well, I guess we stink. But why are we held to a different standard from all these other teams out there who ain\u2019t ever won nothing?\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s amazing that he refuses to acknowledge why that\u2019s the case.<\/p>\n
Dabo, you created the standard. In fact, you had a catchphrase for it that\u2019s painted all over the walls in Clemson\u2019s building: \u201cBest is the Standard.\u201d<\/p>\n
Why would anybody \u2014 especially you as the head coach \u2014 expect to hold the second-best program of the 2010s to the same standard as NC State or Ole Miss? And why wouldn\u2019t you expect it to be a source of frustration when you haven\u2019t lived up to that standard for five years?<\/p>\n
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We all know Swinney\u2019s track record. But that really has nothing to do with where Clemson is now, except in one respect: That success has enabled Swinney to get every possible resource the university can offer in service of trying to win championships.<\/p>\n
That includes his $11.3 million salary.<\/p>\n
It makes you wonder, who\u2019s the ungrateful one here?<\/p>\n
With Saturday\u2019s loss to Syracuse, which followed a familiar script of offensive ineptitude and defensive underperformance, Clemson\u2019s season is effectively over. Now it\u2019s time for Swinney to stop the whining and self-pity and start figuring out how he\u2019s going adapt in every area of the program, from offensive philosophy to NIL to recruiting.<\/p>\n
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And he needs to do it with winning as the sole focus, not trying to prove some quixotic point about what he believes is righteous in college athletics.<\/p>\n
Clemson isn\u2019t ever likely to send Swinney on his way. But if he isn\u2019t capable of change and doesn\u2019t believe it\u2019s fair to hold him to the standard that he created there, then he should take the initiative and make this season his last.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dabo Swinney, in a fit of delusion that has become all too frequent in recent years, basically dared…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":242412,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[45040,45038,66713,1318,54988,1317,1315,1316,1714,62,4695,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-242411","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-cade-klubnik","9":"tag-clemson","10":"tag-dabo-swinney","11":"tag-football","12":"tag-national-championships","13":"tag-ncaa","14":"tag-ncaa-football","15":"tag-ncaafootball","16":"tag-ole-miss","17":"tag-sports","18":"tag-syracuse","19":"tag-united-states","20":"tag-unitedstates","21":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115238877448593281","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242411\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}