In an interview with ESPN, Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney pushed back on the narrative surrounding his program coming off a highly disappointing 7-6 campaign in 2025.
“The narrative of our program, it’s just not accurate,” Swinney said, via ESPN’s Andrea Adelson. “If we go have a bunch of bad years, that’s different, but we’ve had one bad year in 15 years. Ten wins is not a bad year. Eleven wins is not a bad year.
“We wrote a bad chapter, but we’re still writing, and the lesson in all of that is it’s not about what people predict, it’s not about what people say. It’s about what you do. We’ve had many years where we were predicted to stink that we were good, and we’ve had a couple years that we predicted to be pretty good, and we stunk.”
While Swinney admits the Tigers “grossly underachieved” last season after entering the year with College Football Playoff and championship aspirations/expectations – only to finish with the second-worst record in Swinney’s 17 full seasons as Clemson’s head coach – Swinney brought up the fact his program still ranks seventh nationally in wins since 2020.
“We just keep beating that dead horse to death. We’re onto the new season. We grossly underachieved and underperformed and did not coach and play to our potential. We’ve had other seasons where we had nobody drafted and won 10-plus games. That’s football,” Swinney said.
“It didn’t work last year. If you do this long enough, you can have a year where it just doesn’t work. I don’t care if you’re Roy Williams or Coach K or Dabo Swinney, it doesn’t matter. It’s what you do moving forward. But I think perspective is important.”
In Adelson’s story for ESPN, Swinney also attempted to clarify the unprompted comments he made about Notre Dame during a recent appearance on Greg McElroy’s Always College Football podcast, while admitting Clemson has a disadvantage with its NIL budget compared to top programs – in the interview with McElroy, Swinney said, “Notre Dame has their own TV station, they make their own rules, they print their own money. They got a money machine in the backyard.”
“That was my comment the other day,” Swinney told Adelson. “All of a sudden I’m getting hate mail from people. We have enough. I was just making a point we never had the same as this school and this school if we met at the middle of the field and compared budgets and alumni bases and total revenues, and five-stars, recruiting rankings — we’d lose every time. You’ve got to have enough, and then it’s about putting it together.
“We may not have a $45 million roster like some teams, but we’ve got enough. We’ve just got to be good with it. We’ve got to be strategic.”
Swinney and his Tigers hope to bounce back this season, beginning with the 2026 opener against the LSU Tigers on Sept. 5 at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, La.
In an April 14 interview on The Jim Rome Show, Swinney fully took the blame for Clemson’s disappointing season a year ago.
“I did not get it done last year,” Swinney said.
