CLEMSON — When looking at the history of Clemson Football, there are four coaches who left their mark on the program – John Heisman, Jess Neely, Frank Howard and Danny Ford.
All four men produced some of the best teams in Clemson’s storied program. All four are in the College Football Hall of Fame, in large part due to their success at Clemson.
However, only one of those four coaches won a national championship during their time as Clemson’s head coach. Ford, an Alabama graduate like Howard, led the Tigers to a 12-0 season in 1981, which was capped with a 22-15 victory over Nebraska in the 1982 Orange Bowl.
Clemson’s win over the Cornhuskers captured the program’s first national championship, which at the time set Ford apart from the school’s other three legendary head coaches.
During his 11 years at Clemson, Ford produced a 96-29-4 record, which included five ACC Championships, four teams that won at least 10 games and two 9-1-1 teams. His Clemson teams were bowl eligible every year, though they turned down bowl bids in 1980 and ’82 and were ineligible—due to NCAA and ACC sanctions—to play in a bowl in 1983 and ’84.
Ford was 6-2 in bowl games, including wins over national powers Ohio State, Nebraska, Penn State and Oklahoma. He also had victories over Notre Dame, Georgia and Florida State, as Clemson was the fifth winningest program in college football in the 1980s.
After Ford stepped down as head coach in January of 1990, Clemson football dropped off, as it wondered around college football without a championship for 20 years. No one ever thought the program could get back to where Ford had it in the 1980s.
But then another Alabama graduate suddenly took over the program in 2009, and it did not take long for Clemson’s fortunes to change.
“I am Dabo Swinney man,” Ford said recently on the Sports Talk Media Network.
Swinney took Clemson to the ACC Championship Game in his first year as head coach and two years later, he won the program its first league title in 20 years. Since then, he has not only matched Ford’s legacy at Clemson, but he has surpassed it.
Swinney, who is about to enter his 19th season as Clemson’s head coach, has produced a 187-53 record at Clemson – a 78 percent win percentage. His 187 wins are not only Clemson records, but they are the most for any coach who has coached in the ACC.
“I think he has the ability to do whatever he wants to do,” Ford said. “He is a dang good football coach when they have dang good players, just like anybody else.”
Since that first ACC Championship in 2011, Swinney’s Clemson teams have won eight more conference championships. They been to the College Football Playoff seven times, including six trips to the Final Four and four trips to the National Championship Game. They have won two CFP National Championships.
Now the dean of ACC coaches, Swinney’s teams have wins over national powers Ohio State, Oklahoma, Georgia, Notre Dame and two wins over Alabama in his two national championship wins.
However, since 2021, Clemson has slipped, though program did capture ACC Championships in 2022 and ’24. The Tigers have made the playoffs just once in the last five seasons and they saw their 12-year streak of winning at least 10 games in a season come to an end.
Last year, with basically an entire roster intact from the 2024 ACC Championship Team, Clemson struggled to a 7-6 record, its worst in 15 years. Many pundits speculate that Swinney has lost his ability to coach.
However, Ford does not believe any of that narrative.
“I am fan of Dabo’s and I pull for him,” the Hall of Fame coach said. “I have respect he can get the job done.”
And one day Swinney will become the fifth head coach in Clemson history to leave his mark on the program, as part of a Hall of Fame career.