SAN JOSE, Calif. — From the day he was first named the head coach at Clemson, Dabo Swinney’s plan was to build Clemson into one of the nation’s elite programs.

He has done exactly that.

In his 10 years at Clemson he has posted a 115-30 record. He has guided the Tigers to five ACC Championships, won eight bowl games, a national championship and on Monday he and the Tigers will play in their third national championship game when they play top-ranked Alabama at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif.

To put that into perspective, Clemson played for a national championship just one other time in the first 113 years prior to Swinney. The Tigers had not won an ACC Championship in almost two decades before Swinney took over.

Clemson (14-0) was just a middle of the pack program in a conference that had been owned by Florida State.

“To be honest with you, when I got the job in ’09, I felt like at Clemson, we could build a program that could compete at the highest level,” Swinney said during Sunday’s coaches press conference at the San Jose Marriott. “We were a long way away from that. That’s for sure. But I felt like we had a few pieces in place, and we just needed to build an infrastructure, we needed to modernize our program in every sense of the word, from staff to our recruiting to our facilities, the way the administration thought. You name it. Because we were competitive, so I felt like at the very beginning that we could be that kind of team.”

The key, for Swinney, in getting Clemson to the level and to the standard of Alabama, who has owned College Football the last decade, was to play a tougher schedule. But it wasn’t about just playing them, but also beating them.

So, Swinney then approached then athletic director Terry Don Phillips and explained how Clemson needed to play teams like Auburn, Georgia, Notre Dame and Texas A&M in its non-conference games to go along with playing longtime rival South Carolina.

“Listen, you can’t be afraid to fail, all right. There’s going to be some failure,” Swinney said. “But that’s a part of your growth. That’s a part of development. That’s the only way that I’m going to be able to teach these guys what it takes. So, from day one, we’ve played Georgia, played Auburn four times.”

Not only did Clemson play those teams, but they started beating them. Once they started to beat them and the players realized they could play and beat elite programs, then everything else just fell into place.

Under Swinney, the Tigers have beat Georgia, Auburn (4 wins), Texas A&M and Notre Dame in non-conference games along with beating the Seminoles in the ACC. In bowl games and in the College Football Playoff, Clemson has taken down LSU, Ohio State (twice), Oklahoma (twice), Notre Dame and Alabama.

“We’ve played Texas A&M, Notre Dame, LSU, we’ve played a lot of people in and outside of our conference that allowed us to compete and developed the program to where we could match up and have the type of postseason success that we’ve had over the past five or six years,” Swinney said.