Could the 2026 campaign be Dabo Swinney’s final year at Clemson?

Swinney’s future with the Tigers appears to be facing increasing scrutiny, and the pressure seems to be mounting heading into the upcoming season due to substandard performance in recent years, with some analysts suggesting he might be on the hot seat and a coaching change could potentially happen if he doesn’t turn things around.

In an episode of College Football Enquirer, a podcast from Yahoo! Sports, Andy Staples, Ross Dellenger and Steven Godfrey weighed in on whether this could be Swinney’s last year at Clemson.

Despite the unprecedented success and heights Swinney has guided Clemson to over the course of his tenure, and the goodwill he’s bought as a result, Staples still doesn’t think the Tigers’ longtime head coach is in a situation where he’s “bulletproof.”

“You think Dabo Swinney, who brought Clemson two national titles, who took Clemson from kind of an also-ran, a pretty good ACC program to a nationally elite program — you’d think he’d be bulletproof. I’m not so sure he is anymore,” Staples said.

“If I were Graham Neff, their AD, I would have to look around the sport at what happened to James Franklin [at Penn State], what happened to Jimbo Fisher [at Texas A&M], what happened to Mark Stoops [at Kentucky] and go, ‘My peers seem to think that this is not an absolute situation, just because of the buyout.’”

Swinney is entering his 19th season (and 18th full season) as Clemson’s head coach in 2026.

Swinney has 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. The Tigers have won nine ACC titles under Swinney, including eight in the last 11 seasons, while he has guided Clemson to seven College Football Playoff appearances.

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 while making the playoff just once in the last five seasons.

Now, 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. In an April 14 interview on The Jim Rome Show, Swinney fully took the blame for Clemson’s disappointing season a year ago.

Despite the way last year transpired after the Tigers came into the season with national title aspirations, Staples isn’t ruling out the chance for Swinney’s program to bounce back.

“He still could pull out of this,” Staples said. “I will say the rhetoric from Dabo Swinney has changed considerably over the past year. … He’s also very much said, ‘This is my fault. This was my fault.’ A lot of coaches that say that. He hadn’t really been saying that. The way he would respond to the questions over the last few years was, look at all I’ve done for you. How can you be ungrateful? … His rhetoric has changed to, ‘This is my fault. I have to do better.’”

However, if Swinney doesn’t right the ship – and in the event he and the Tigers were to part ways — Staples is skeptical about how much job interest he’d get from other programs with sights set on trying to win it all.  

 “If this doesn’t work, if something happens, if it all goes bad there, I don’t think teams that want to compete for national titles would be interested,” Staples said of Swinney. 

“I do think he understands what has happened now. Again, very smart to now shift the blame to yourself. Because you cannot have that [2026 NFL Draft] haul and then turn back and say it’s the system or it’s the this or it’s the that. You had good enough players. Everybody else who had the same number or more drafted got in the playoff last year.”

CBS Sports’ Cody Nagel recently made a bold prediction for each ACC team ahead the upcoming season, and for Clemson, Nagel predicted that “2026 will mark the end of the Swinney era.”

CBS Sports also ranked the 10 college football coaches “under the most pressure” in 2026, including Swinney. Additionally, 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.”

The Athletic recently predicted the head coach for each Power 4 program in 2030. For Clemson, the Tigers’ projected coach in 2030 is not Swinney, but instead … current SMU head coach Rhett Lashlee.

You can check out the full commentary on Swinney from Staples, Dellenger and Godfrey in the following video, beginning at the 29:45 mark: