CHARLOTTE – Dabo Swinney hears it all. The Clemson head coach hears all the vitriol directed at him, his program and his players.

However, that doesn’t mean it does anything more than go in one ear and out the other.

When Swinney was hired as the full-time head coach following the 2008 season, he had a vision for what he wanted his program to look like. Despite the massive shifts in the college football landscape, that vision has never changed.

Over the past three years, with the Tigers having failed to make the College Football Playoff, some have proclaimed that Swinney’s time is over. That the game has passed him by.

On Saturday night, he pushed back against that narrative. With its 34-31 last-second win over SMU in the ACC Championship Game, Swinney’s Tigers punched their ticket back to the playoff.

It was Clemson’s ninth conference championship since Swinney took over. The head coach is now 9-1 in the ACC Championship since losing in his first appearance in 2009.

“When I got this job, we were here in 2011 and won it for the first time in 20 years, and we hadn’t won 10 games in 20 years,” the head coach said after the win. “We just had our 10th win for the 13th time in 14 years and our ninth championship in the past 14 years and our seventh CFP. Even with all that, people still want me to be like everybody else.”

With the victory, the Tigers have now won 10 games or more 13 times in the past 14 seasons and very few coaches have had that kind of success and that kind of longevity.

Sure, there have been things Swinney’s had to adapt to and there have been times he’s had to make changes to his staff, but through it all, the foundational aspects of his program have remained mostly unchanged.

And now Swinney will take his team to the playoff for a seventh time.

“I know everybody wants me to be like everybody else, but I don’t know how to be like everybody else,” Swinney said. “We’re a very unique and uncommon program. I think we’ve won more games than anybody other than Alabama the past 16 years, and we certainly won more championships I think now and conference championships in the past 10 years than anybody and second most CFPs. Not only have we gotten to these CFPs, we’ve won. We’ve won on the highest stage against the best of the best.

“We’re at a point now where we don’t win a championship and we’ve got to fire everybody and it’s just — same ol’ tired narratives that come up every single year when we lose a game. You can check our record versus the SEC. You can check it versus the Big Ten. You can check it versus Notre Dame because that’s really who runs college football.”

Clemson has been a mainstay on the postseason scene during Swinney’s tenure. Not only have they advanced to the postseason, his Tigers tend to win when they get there.

“This is our 14th year in a row with a postseason win,” he said. “Nobody ever has done anything like that in college football. But all we hear is how bad we are and how terrible we are and how stupid I am and how whatever. We just keep winning. We just keep winning.”

Swinney also readily admits that every button he pushes won’t be the right one. No coach is perfect, and Swinney has never claimed to be. However, he believes in how he runs his program and no amount of narratives will force him into changing.

“We’re not perfect. I am far from perfect,” Swinney said. “But we have great players who believe in who we are and what we do and we have great coaches, and we’re family. That’s the best answer I can give you. It’s a blessing to be a part of it. I don’t take that for granted. I told the team coming in, there’s so many great coaches that never get a chance to coach in a game like this, prepare for a game like this, win a game like this, and there’s very few players that get a chance to experience it.”

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