This national outlet says the seat that Dabo Swinney has sat on for so long at Clemson is really warming up, if it isn’t hot already.

CBS Sports released its 2026 college football hot seat rankings, with a panel of the outlet’s experts evaluating the job security of all 138 FBS coaches.

Swinney’s hot seat rating is currently 3.1. What that means, CBS Sports says, is the “pressure is mounting” on Swinney entering the 2026 season. Clemson’s longtime head coach is one of 14 coaches in that category (rating from 3-3.99).

When CBS Sports released its hot seat rankings in July 2025, Swinney’s rating was 0.22, which put him in the “untouchable” category. However, things have changed a lot since then, as Swinney’s Tigers head into the upcoming campaign hoping to bounce back from a 7-6 record in 2025, the second-worst season in Swinney’s tenure at Clemson.

Back in February, CBS Sports ranked the 10 college football coaches “under the most pressure” in 2026, and Swinney was ranked No. 7. Also in February, CBS Sports published an article on the college football coaching carousel, and Swinney was listed among 25 coaches “to keep an eye on when the carousel starts spinning in 2026” and who “could be on the move after the 2026 season.”

Swinney has dropped precipitously in various college football head coach rankings entering the 2026 season, in large part due to last season’s disappointment and only one College Football Playoff appearance since 2020.

Despite his long track record of success as a two-time national championship coach, and the nine ACC titles and seven CFP appearances on his resume, Swinney is ranked No. 10 nationally among head coaches by Sporting News (down seven spots from last year) and No. 11 nationally by 10 CBS Sports panelists (down eight spots from last year), to name a couple of examples. Swinney was ranked as high as No. 5 by one of those CBS Sports panelists, but another had him all the way down at No. 28.   

On3’s Andy Staples recently ranked Swinney as not the third-best head coach in the country, but the third-best head coach in the ACC alone, behind Miami’s Mario Cristobal and Virginia Tech’s James Franklin.

The 56-year-old Swinney is entering his 19th season (and 18th full season) as Clemson’s head coach in 2026, with a career head coaching record of 187-53. He is Clemson’s all-time winningest coach, the winningest coach in ACC history and the first coach to lead the Tigers to multiple national championships.

Swinney’s four national championship game appearances are more than any other active coach, and Swinney and Georgia’s Kirby Smart are the only active coaches with multiple national titles. In 13 of the last 15 years, Swinney’s Clemson program has won 10-plus games, though the Tigers have won fewer than 10 in two of the last three years.

With that roster full of NFL talent, Clemson was ranked No. 4 in the AP Poll going into the 2025 season and was widely expected to contend for a national title, only to start 1-3 and quickly drop out of the ACC title race and CFP conversation.