When the movers finally pack up Dabo Swinney’s Clemson office, he’ll have left the place just how he found it.
Muddied in mediocrity.
That’s the truly sad situation about where Swinney's tenure stands. Every coach aspires to leave a program in a better place than he found it. Swinney won't be able to say that.
Clemson was an average ACC team when Swinney got the job, nearly two decades ago. By the time Swinney exits or is forced out, Clemson will have retreated to the ACC's dustbin of fair to middling programs.
A tenure that included dynastic dominance and two national championships now marches to the beat of four-score defeats. If the weathervane holds its current
direction, this probably will end messily, too. Breakups with legends often become uncomfortable for everyone involved.
Whenever it ends, whether this season or the next or the next, it’ll be with memories of Clemson getting clubbed by 28 points fresher in the brain than the heyday when Swinney landed a couple of haymakers on Nick Saban's kisser.
This saga brings to mind a preseason conversation I had with Lane Kiffin. As I pressed Kiffin about his decision to leave Mississippi for LSU, he made the argument that 99% of coaching tenures — that’s Kiffin’s math, not mine — end in one of three ways:
- The coach leaves for another job.
- The coach is fired.
- The coach is perhaps not technically fired, but forced out.
In other words, happy endings are rare, even for legends.
“I bet it’s less than 1%,” Kiffin told me, “the Nick Saban stories” of a tenure continuing gloriously until the coach retires on his terms.
Dabo Swinney isn't heading toward a '1%' Nick Saban exit at Clemson
Phillip Fulmer won a national championship at Tennessee, and the Vols unveiled a statue for him this year, but before that, he got fired.
Bobby Bowden’s statue stands outside Florida State’s stadium. Bowden put the Seminoles alongside Nebraska as the greatest programs of the ‘90s. Ten years after Bowden’s second national championship, Florida State forced him out.
Swinney is eight years’ removed from his second national title. The problem is less that he’s no longer winning national championships and more that he's losing games by 41 and 28 points, within the span of a few weeks.
His once-dominant Tigers are now roadkill, at least when up against quality opponents.
Clemson became mediocre, just like Tennessee and FSU had become when Fulmer and Bowden reached the end of their legendary tenures.
Bowden was 80 years old when Florida State tossed him overboard, but Fulmer was 58 at the time of his Tennessee ouster. Swinney is 56. He says he’s got tread left on his tires, but Clemson’s got tire tracks on its back.
Kiffin mentioned Gary Patterson as an example of a coach who once supplied unprecedented success to a program, only to be forced out in the end.
Kiffin applied his rationale that most coaches either leave, get fired, or are eventually forced out to justify his decision to leave Mississippi for LSU. Even if he’d stayed at Ole Miss last year, and even if he got a statue there some years down the line, he worried his tenure wouldn’t end in sweet harmony.
“I started thinking," Kiffin told me, "there’s legends who’d done much more than what I’d done at Ole Miss, and they ended up getting fired or pushed out."
So, Kiffin stayed one step ahead of the posse and spurned Ole Miss for LSU.
To be clear, Kiffin never specifically mentioned Swinney during our conversation. But, his argument that 99% of tenures end in one of three ways — and, none of those options are happy endings — forecasted this Swinney-Clemson situation, which almost certainly ends with Swinney leaving, getting fired, or otherwise being forced out.
Clemson would pay the price if it bailed on this tailspin. Swinney would be owed $57 million if Clemson fires him, and his deal includes no offset language.
Is there a market for Dabo Swinney if he left Clemson?
Swinney badly needs a reboot elsewhere. He and Clemson are the portrait of a stale marriage, but if he’s the one to file for divorce, where would he go?
Swinney’s brand best suits the South, but the SEC is headed for a quieter spin of the carousel than last year’s tilt-a-whirl. Jobs that seem likeliest to open this fall — say, Maryland or Rutgers or North Carolina or South Carolina — are worse than the job Swinney has.
By the time Saban retired and became a member of the 1%, the idea of Dabo being a suitable heir at Alabama had long since sailed.
In hindsight, you could make a convincing case Swinney would’ve been better off pulling a Kiffin and leaving Clemson several years ago, after his championships but before his stock cooled. That's the trickiest part about stocks: knowing when to cash in.
Three years ago, when a reporter asked Swinney whether he had interest in Texas A&M’s job, he swatted aside the suggestion.
“Must be November, that's all I can say,” Swinney said, alluding to the November rumor mill.
Well, now it’s October, and the November rumor mill about other jobs has given way to Swinney on the hot seat.
One more time, Lane, remind us how this usually ends?
“That (happy ending) happens like 1%” of the time, Kiffin told me before this season. “When coaches get hired, 99% of the time, one thing is going to happen: They’re going to leave for another job, or they’re going to get fired.”
At Clemson, that math checks out.
Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network's senior national college football columnist. Listen to his podcast, "College Football Unfiltered." Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Dabo Swinney, Clemson limp toward obvious ending. Lane Kiffin almost predicted it
