When Dabo Swinney took over at Clemson in 2009, he wanted to build the football program into a consistent winner. One that could compete with the big boys in college football day in and day out, programs like Florida State, LSU, Oklahoma, Ohio State, Notre Dame and Alabama.

Mission accomplished.

Eight years after becoming Clemson’s head coach, Swinney led the Clemson football program to its first national championship in 35 years. However, the Tigers success did not come all at once. It was a gradual climb that started by winning the ACC Atlantic Division in 2009 for the time, then winning the ACC Championship for the first time in 20 years in 2011. The program also won 10 games for the first time that year since 1990 and has not looked back since.

In the last six years, only Alabama has won more games than the Tigers (70), while Clemson and Alabama are the only two programs to win at least 10 games every year during that span. Clemson has won the Atlantic Division five times, won the ACC three times, won five straight bowl games, played for the national championship twice and won one as well.

So what is more difficult, building a successful program or maintaining one?

“They are both extremely difficult,” Swinney said. “Both are incredible challenges, but different challenges. When you are trying to build it, you know you are going to have a ton of failure along the way. You have to have the fortitude to stick with it and to continue to keep believing even though you are not quite seeing the results you want in certain situations.

“When you have had a ton of success, it’s not like last year was our first. Winning the national championship was the only thing we haven’t done. For us it is the same formula that it has been. We start over.”

Swinney says he, his coaches and his players have to fight really hard every day to protect the culture they have built at Clemson.

“I don’t assume anything. I teach everything over,” Swinney said. “I reinstall everything for the coaches, the players, you name it. You are always trying to get better. You’re always trying to challenge yourself. It is all about the people, the discipline, the little things … the little things are critical.

“We just try to protect that every single day in how we talk to the players, how we practice, how we coach them, how we recruit, the discipline as a staff, you name it. It’s academically. It is all areas. It is fighting every day.”

Prior to spring break, Swinney invited back former players such as Dwayne Allen, Robert Smith, Jonathan Meeks, Chandler Catanzaro and C.J. Spiller to talk to the team for about 50 minutes before practice. He had them talk about the Clemson culture and what it means to them after they leave the program.

“They told them what they are getting here and how that applies when they leave here and the cultural of our program,” Swinney said. “Both are hard. There is no question. It is hard to be consistent. That is probably what I am most proud of is that we have been an incredibly consistent program for a long time and to be really relevant, that is what you have to do. You have to be really good and you have to do it for a long period of time. That is how we got here.

“It was not some simultaneous success, it was sequential. You do one right thing and then you do the next right thing. Success builds on success if you stay focused on the things that matter day in and day out.”

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