CHARLOTTE — Dabo Swinney made it clear on Thursday that seven wins are not good enough at Clemson.

After starting the 2025 season by losing three of their first four games, Swinney’s Tigers did rebound and win six of their next eight, before falling to Penn State in the Pinstripe Bowl and finishing 7-6. It was Swinney’s worst season since 2010, which was also the last time Clemson finished with a below .500 record (6-7).

Swinney led the Tigers to an ACC Championship the following season, his first as a head coach, which kicked off an unprecedented run of success. The Tigers made six consecutive appearances in the College Football Playoff and won two national titles over the next several years. Swinney won another conference title and led Clemson to a seventh playoff appearance in 2024.

With so much of that same team returning in 2025, the Tigers were a preseason Top 5 team, with many predicting another playoff run. However, not once did the Tigers come close to resembling a team worthy of being ranked inside the top five last year, and Swinney, again, took responsibility for what transpired on the field.

“Seven wins is not good enough for us at Clemson,” Swinney said during the ACC Kickoff.

In fact, Swinney took it a step further, insisting the issues were not talent-related. Having nine players off that team selected in the last NFL Draft backs that statement up.

So what went wrong? A lot, and Swinney says he is to blame for all of it.

“We did not win close games. We did not handle the adversity of the season,” the head coach added. “Now it’s football stuff, as I have said many times. We did not have 11 guys on the same page playing cover 3 or cover 2, or whatever it was. We did not run the ball effectively. We did not execute on third down. It was not talent. It was football stuff. And that is why I say, ‘That’s on me,’ because that is my job. To make it work, and it did not work.”

“When you don’t win the close games, you don’t finish in the fourth quarter — that is on me as the head coach. Mental toughness. That is your staff. It is how you use your personnel. It is all of it. It is confidence. All that.”

At the same time, while Swinney was certainly disappointed with the results of last season, he was also proud of how his team finished, aside from the lackluster loss to Penn State.

Now Swinney gets to start the next chapter and begin rewriting the narrative surrounding his program. The Tigers will travel to Baton Rouge to take on LSU in a primetime affair set for September 5 to start the season. Win that one, and perceptions start to quickly change. Lose it, and the Tigers are once again in a hole to begin the season.

“Having said that, I am really proud of my team,” Swinney said. “Because they did the work and were a great group of people. At the end of the day, you are 3-5, and with the type of expectations, at most places it would have been 3-9. But those guys rallied. They did not point fingers. They stayed together on what we could achieve in the moment we were in, and we won four in a row to have our 15th winning season in a row. And I have said, a winning season is not our goal, but that was a big deal in that moment.