On Sunday, ESPN personality Paul Finebaum didn’t hold back on Dabo Swinney – Finebaum brought the hammer down hard on Clemson’s longtime head coach.

Finebaum joined SportsCenter to assess the Tigers after they fell to 1-3 to start the season with Saturday’s 34-21 loss to Syracuse at Death Valley.

Finebaum proceeded to blast Swinney, when asked what’s wrong with his program right now.

“First of all, I think Dabo Swinney oughta pipe down,” Finebaum said. “Nobody wants to hear the ‘woe is me’ routine from him. It’s getting very old. Everyone knows what he’s accomplished. Dabo, you don’t need to remind us of that. We know. We watch the games. We saw your two national championships. So Dabo, shut up, first of all, and try to get your team back in this season. Yes, there’s only eight games remaining, and your path to the playoff is about as narrow as me having a full of head of hair by 5 o’clock this afternoon.

“And the bottom line is this – there are so many problems. But the biggest thing to me, aside from Klubnik, is the defense. We expected them to be elite this year with edge rushers all over the place, and they have not performed. So, that buck stops with Dabo Swinney.”

Finebaum went even further on The Matt Barrie Show, calling Swinney a “laughing stock” and saying he should either leave Clemson to coach at another school, or become an analyst on TV like former coaches such as Nick Saban and Jimbo Fisher.

“There’s a lot of reasons for this, but my advice to Dabo – and I know he doesn’t like taking advice from people like me – is to get out of there,” Swinney said. “Be quiet. Quit talking, because he has no credibility now with his fan base. They’ve heard the whines before. He’s become a meme. For a really good coach, and I do believe he’s a really good coach, he’s become somewhat of a laughing stock every time he opens his mouth, and it’s time for him to do one of two things.

“It’s either consider another school, and I think he is hirable if he quits talking. Or just get away from football and become a TV guy. He’s very funny. He’s got more credentials than any other none-TV coach out there. And what I mean by that is Saban’s already got a job. I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about of the people that could leave coaching and go into TV, he would be very coveted. Or find someplace to go. There will be a lot of openings, and when you introduce Dabo Swinney, it’s not a bad look. Jimbo Fisher has done pretty well with leaning on one national championship. Dabo has a much better resume.”

Either way, Finebaum believes “it’s over” for Swinney at Clemson and “it’s time for him to go.”

“I think it’s over at Clemson. Let’s quit trying to sugarcoat it,” Finebaum said. “Sometimes it’s very difficult to get it back when you’ve lost it. He lost it, he got it back, now he’s lost it again and he’s lost it badly. It’s time for him to go.”

Finebaum added that Clemson’s struggles this season and how the Tigers have looked, with so many returning stars who came back, is “one of the hardest things to explain I’ve ever seen.”

“While some of these schools, Illinois being one, we built them up on hype — Clemson had legitimate players,” Finebaum said. “That was not some manufactured situation. That was a great coach, great program, elite players on defense, either the best or second-best quarterback in the country. And that’s not according to pundits like me, that’s according to people that study this stuff and make rankings for the NFL. So, this is one of the hardest things to explain I’ve ever seen.

“I mean, the first loss [to LSU] is understandable, but since then, there’s simply no rhyme or reason. Now, I’m sure if you’re sitting in the ACC office this morning in Charlotte, you’re going, ‘Well the reason is, the ACC is a very deep league.’ It is. No argument. But Clemson is your bell cow, and they can’t even deal with the pedestrian schools in the league, and Syracuse is one of those. I was in Atlanta three weeks ago and saw what Tennessee did to Syracuse. It wasn’t even a competitive game.”