CLEMSON – In the last two months, Clemson has had its worst start to a football season since 1998. With five losses in eight games, the Tigers, led by head coach Dabo Swinney, have struggled to put it together.

On the other side of the country, Colorado head coach Deion Sanders is in a similar situation, with a 3-6 record with only one win in the Big 12 Conference after a trip to the Alamo Bowl and a nine-win season last year.

According to Swinney at Tuesday’s weekly press conference, the recent struggles from both head coaches made it clear: it was “Prime Time” for a catch up. Last weekend, Sanders reached out to Swinney to catch up.

“Misery loves company,” Swinney said with a laugh. “We just cried on each other’s shoulder. He’s kind of become a friend. He reached out to me this summer.”

Earlier this year, after the initial conversations between the two coaches, Sanders, a two-time Super Bowl champion, expressed his admiration for Swinney after identical 1-2 starts.

“Dabo Swinney is one of my favorites,” Sanders said. “I love him to life. I love the man he is, the coach he is. He’s just a great guy, a guy that I can look up to in this coaching realm. Looking back on some of the things that they’ve accomplished, they’ve been sitting here before, 1-2, and they turned it all around.”

This unlikely friendship formed even though the two college football icons have only met once in person, when Sanders was working with ESPN from 2008 to 2020, before he took the head coaching position at Jackson State.

“He’s always been a hero of mine,” Swinney said. “I’ve always liked him. I really have… but we just kind of connected this summer. Had a lot to talk about, had a great conversation, and then he just reached out yesterday just to kind of chitchat.”

Although the two coaches are now peers, which Swinney calls rare in his profession, the pair had very different starts in college football.

Sanders played football, basketball, and football for three seasons at Florida State from 1986-1989. He played in the College World Series twice, won multiple conference championships on the track, and won the Jim Thorpe Award, marking him as the best defensive back in the country his junior season on the gridiron. His fame and “Prime-Time” persona were widely known across the scope of college athletics.

In the same year that Sanders won the Thorpe Award, led his team to an 11-1 season, and ultimately was drafted to the MLB and NFL, Swinney was barely a walk-on for Alabama’s football team, scrapping to be noticed by his coaches.

“I always tell everybody, I was a crawl-on. I was one notch below a walk-on,” he said in 2020. “I crawled on the field out there. I had to go through – they didn’t invite me to come out.”

Swinney went on to letter three times at Alabama, and three decades after his first practice as a “crawl-on,” he notched two national championships as a coach and one as a player in 1992. Sanders, of course, went on to become the first athlete to ever play in a Super Bowl and a World Series.

Now, despite vastly different beginnings, career paths, and locations, the two are in a similar situation as famed coaches with disappointing seasons.

“You don’t have a lot of peers in this business, but we’re both kind of going through a challenging season,” Swinney said. Ironically, we’re playing Florida State, and he did not wish me well,” he added with a laugh.

While Swinney and Sanders never got to play each other in college or so far as coaches, the Tigers (3-4, 2-3 ACC) will take on Sanders’ alma mater the Seminoles (4-4, 1-4 ACC) this weekend in an attempt to pick up their first ACC win at home in over a year.

Coverage will be shown on ESPN for a 7:30 kickoff.