National college football analyst Josh Pate gave some thoughts on Dabo Swinney and Clemson after a very disappointing 7-6 season in 2025, which was capped off by a 22-10 loss to Penn State in the Pinstripe Bowl this past Saturday.

“Dabo Swinney went 7-6 with a custom-built team… The Pinstripe Bowl runners up, Clemson Tigers. Just one of many sentences, phrases I didn’t expect to be using here in December, but that’s what college football has done to us this year,” Pate said on his college football show.

During his show, Pate fielded the following question from Phillip Moore of Spartanburg, S.C.:

“Clemson diehard here, and while I love what Dabo did to bring Clemson to the top of the sport, it feels like the Tigers have tumbled and he’s not the right guy to handle this era of CFB… Am I crazy for thinking this?” Moore asked.

Pate then gave his response.

“No, you are not. You are not crazy for thinking this because Phillip, you know what the standard at Clemson is,” Pate said. “The standard at Clemson is the standard at Clemson, because Dabo Swinney made it the standard. Had Dabo never existed, and we just copied and pasted what Clemson had been – which was a decent, pretty good program for the past 15 years – like, if we just stretched what they had been pre-Dabo over the past 15 years, it’d be a little bit different. But you’ve seen what Clemson can be, because Dabo Swinney showed you, and now you won’t accept anything less. And they’ve become less than what they were. College football has changed all around Dabo Swinney. Dabo has changed minimally to keep up with the changes in college football.”

Pate revisited what he thought about Clemson heading into the 2025 season, when the Tigers were a popular preseason pick to win the national championship.  

Pate was one of the analysts who at least expected Clemson to make the College Football Playoff. Now, after the way things went down this year, he isn’t optimistic about the future of Swinney’s program.

“Here’s how I thought about this season in the summer. … Everything about this 2025 team is quintessentially Dabo Swinney,” Pate said. “He’s got his hand-picked offensive coordinator, multiple years in the system now. His hand-picked, in-house developed quarterback, multiple years in the system, with the same coordinator. They’ve got the No. 1 returning production roster in the country. They’re all Clemson kids. They were all recruited here. They’ve been developed here. There’s minimal portal infusion whatsoever. Favorable schedule. This right here will be the truest test, out of any test for any of these teams, about how it reflects on the head coach at the program, and they went 7-6.

“So yeah, I wouldn’t feel good about it at all. I don’t feel good about it at all. And when I say ‘about it at all,’ I mean as it relates to Clemson being a national title contender, which they should be. There’s no excuse why they can’t be. They’ve got really, really good players there. They’ve got access to really good talent. They’ve got all the advantage in the world, some of it they choose not to partake in, which is the call of the head coach there. So, for anyone who thinks this was like some blip on the radar screen – no, it’s trended this way for several years, firstly. … Why should I expect any better? Why should I expect it to turn around? This past year was gonna be the year that if the Dabo model still worked, it would be proven.”

Pate added that “any sizable improvement with that program at this point would require significant change, and I don’t think Dabo Swinney is the kind of guy at this point in his career that’s going to significantly change.”

“And so what it could just be is it could be that we’re sort of watching the final chapter or chapters being written of the Dabo era at Clemson,” Pate said. “If it ended today, he’d go down as one of the best of all-time. First ballot Hall of Famer. He is the face of Clemson football. … I couldn’t think any more highly of him. But there’s an end to everything.

“Like, there’s an end to every run. And if you’re not going to get with the program here, if you’re not going to adjust, if you’re not going to adapt – you will die as it pertains to being a playoff contender. That’s been an age-old concept. Tale as old as time. It’s happened a billion times. This would just be a billion and one.”