Let me ask you this question. What does the national media have against Clemson?
Is it a vendetta?
What has Clemson done to them?
I ask because sometimes it just seems like they just do not like Clemson.
There are countless reasons out there. Just go look for it. You do not have to wear orange-colored glasses to find them either.
The latest shot comes from the good folks at On3. In a recent list of the top 25 College Football Coaches, On3 writer Jesse Simonton lists Clemson’s Dabo Swinney as the sixth best college football coach in the country.
The sixth best, really?!
Before I get into why this opinion is ridiculous—and it is—let me tell you who are the other five coaches he has in front of Dabo.
No. 1 on his list is Georgia’s Kirby Smart, which I have no issue with. Smart’s Georgia teams have won two of the last three national championships and beat Clemson head-to-head when it counted.
However, here are the rest of the names listed above Swinney: LSU’s Brian Kelly, Alabama’s Kalen DeBoer, Ohio State’s Ryan Day, and Texas’ Steve Sarkisian.
How are these four gentlemen better than Dabo Swinney?
I guess his resume does not matter, even though Simonton uses the others’ resume to support their cases.
Swinney has won two national championships as a head coach. And, by the way, that was not by accident.
He is not a fly-by-night coach who won one national championship and then slipped into mediocrity. No, Swinney guided four teams in five years to the national championship game.
He is still the only coach to take his program to six College Football Playoff appearances in a row. Not even the great Nick Saban accomplished such a feat.
Is Dabo Swinney better than Nick Saban? No, but that is not the debate.
Swinney is better than Brian Kelly, though. Swinney has defeated Kelly three out of the four times their teams have met, including a 30-3 win in the 2019 CFP Semifinals and a 34-10 win in the 2020 ACC Championship Game.
Why is Kalen DeBoer ranked No. 3? Because he had one great season at Washington? Because he is the head coach at Alabama? That automatically makes him a better coach than Swinney?
Personally, I need to see more of DeBoer. I need to see if he is a Kirby Smart or Dabo Swinney and not a Jimbo Fisher before I rank him above Swinney. Show me some consistency, which obviously this writer does not value if your name is William Christopher Swinney.
Why is Ryan Day ahead of Swinney. In head-to-head matchups they are 1-1, both meetings coming in the CFP. However, Day’s teams have only played for one national championship, and they lost that one.
Day has a great resume and is a great coach. However, at least for the time being, he has no reason to be ahead of Swinney on any list.
Then there is Steve Sarkisian, a coach Simonton admits failed as the head coach at Washington and USC. He also says Sarkisian is “building” a monster of a program at Texas. Last year was his first 10-win season as a head coach.
You know how many 10-win seasons Dabo Swinney has as a head coach? Exactly! His Clemson teams produced 12 straight from 2011-2022 – the third longest streak in the history of college football.
Yet, a guy who uses the transfer portal and has an NIL budget at his disposal that is insane, is a better coach than Dabo Swinney? Really?!
If Sarkisian is so good, why did he fail at Southern Cal?
Again, one great season does not make a coach great.
Granted, Clemson has slipped the last three years compared to where they were with Alabama, Ohio State and Georgia. However, winning 30 games in three years is not enough of a slip to constitute this.
Yes, Swinney is stubborn about using the transfer portal. And, yes, he probably could do a better job explaining to all IPTAY supporters why supporting the NIL collective needs to be a priority.
But neither of those reasons are good enough to ignore his record and what he has accomplished at Clemson. He has a 170-43 record as a head coach – all at Clemson. As I mentioned above, he played for four national championships in five years and won two of them.
With six different quarterbacks, he has won eight ACC Championships. Three quarterbacks took him to six straight CFPs.
Swinney is the second-best coach in college football, and it is not even close.
The reason Dabo Swinney is ranked No. 6 on Simonton’s list is the same reason he does not get the credit he deserves in other lists. Because they do not like Dabo Swinney, even though they do not know him.
They have a perceived notion of who Dabo Swinney is based on what they have read and seen from others in the national media, who think they know Dabo Swinney.
If they were to talk to any of us who have actually covered Clemson, who work with him on a daily basis, they would see he is a fair and kind man, who genuinely cares about all of his players, coaches and their families.
He even cares about us, the local media.
If they just talk to us, they will see he is good to the media and allows more access than most well established programs.
In a way, that might be why Dabo Swinney is not liked by the national media, as much as I hate to write it. If he was more of an ass to the media like Saban, Smart and Bob Stoops, then maybe the national media would like him more.
However, Swinney gets run over by the media every time he takes the time to answer a question they presented to him. It’s not like Swinney comes into a press conference and just says things. No, he is asked and then those that asked or others who are listening, blast him for giving them the answer or answers they were seeking.
My point is this. Swinney is ranked No. 6 on this list because the writer has a perceived notion of who he thinks Dabo Swinney is as a person and he is holding that against him.
It’s either that, or he has something against Clemson, which has been going on in the national media since the days of Frank Howard.
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