Dabo Swinney has said countless times his favorite sport, as a player, was basketball. It is still a sport he plays today and plays well.

Swinney’s love for basketball is becoming more and more obvious when the Clemson football coach compares his former players to famous NBA players.

In 2017, Swinney told reporters at the Senior Bowl that teams passing on Deshaun Watson would be like passing on Michael Jordan. With the 2021 NFL Draft less than two weeks away, he is now comparing Trevor Lawrence to Steph Curry.

Swinney says watching Lawrence throw the football is like watching Curry shoot a basketball.

Curry, of course, is one of the best shooters in the NBA, while helping his Golden State Warriors win three World Championships four years (2015, ’17 and ’18). They also played for the NBA Championship in 2016 and 2019.

“When you get to see him live and you get to see him move, you just go, ‘Wow, I mean it’s just different,’” Swinney said when comparing Lawrence to Curry on the Move the Sticks Podcast with the NFL Network’s Daniel Jeremiah and Bucky Brooks.

Unlike Watson’s draft situation, Swinney does not have to worry about where Lawrence will fall in the draft. The former Clemson quarterback will presumably be the No. 1 overall pick by the Jacksonville Jaguars in the April 29 draft. He will become the first Clemson Tiger in history to go No. 1 overall in an NFL Draft.

Going off Swinney’s comparison to Curry, Jeremiah says Lawrence is a pure thrower like Curry is a pure shooter.

“I don’t think that’s a crazy leap to make there between those two,” he said.

Swinney spoke about how Lawrence has earned his opportunity to be the No. 1 pick by working hard and progressing through his journey at Clemson. More importantly, how he stayed grounded, even with all the success he had in Tigertown.

Like Curry, Lawrence had a lot of success at Clemson as he continued to grow as a player. He was 34-2 as the Tigers’ starting quarterback. He led Clemson to the 2018 National Championship as a true freshman and took them back to the title game in 2019.

He also became just the second Clemson quarterback in the program’s history to win three ACC Championships, while throwing for 10,090 yards and 90 touchdowns in his career with just 17 interceptions. He completed more than 67 percent of his career passes.

“One of the things that we’ve been excited about Trevor Lawrence for a long time is when you are around him, and we were around him early,” Brooks said. “We got a chance to see him in high school. We had the initial impression of ‘Wow that looks like a franchise quarterback.’

“From a prototypical standpoint, he is everything you want. He is tall. He is long. He has great arm talent. He is athletic. Man, what more could you want, particularly when you start digging into his personality. So, the comparison to Steph Curry, I absolutely buy because we define quarterbacks as shooters and scorers. Trevor Lawrence is one of the best shooters that we’ve seen at the position.”

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