Dabo Swinney currently sits atop this list you don’t want to be on.
Clemson’s longtime head coach landed at No. 1 in CBS Sports’ “Week 2 Anxiety Rankings”.
Compiled by college football writer Tom Fornelli, the list tracks the country’s most anxious fanbases and coaching situations.
Swinney took the top spot following Clemson’s sobering, 51-10 season-opening loss to LSU last Saturday.
Fornelli highlighted growing concern over repeating trends for the program:
This is about far more than one loss, as bad as Clemson’s 51-10 defeat by LSU to begin the season was. This is the continuation of a trend for Dabo Swinney and his program. It’s the fourth consecutive season the Tigers have lost their season-opener, and it’s the second time in three years they’ve had their doors blown off. This year it was LSU; in 2024 it was Georgia winning 34-3.
You can try to hand-wave away the defeats by saying they’re the first game of the season, and they’re against elite teams. After all, Georgia was the No. 2 seed in the College Football Playoff that year, and if not for a Carson Beck injury in the SEC Championship Game, the Bulldogs may have made a deep run, perhaps winning another national title. And this LSU team? Well, it certainly looked like a playoff team against Clemson. One that can make a run of its own.
The problem with this analysis, though, is that Clemson is supposed to be a national title contender too. Swinney certainly still projects that his program belongs among the elite, and can certainly adopt a condescending tone toward anybody who doubts him or his program. …
Clemson went 35-17 against ranked teams from 2011-22 and 119-23 against the Power Four. Only Alabama had a higher win percentage than the Tigers against the Power Four in that span. It’s been clear to many outside of Clemson that the program has been moving in the wrong direction for a few years now, as Swinney has been slow to embrace the foundational changes to the sport that the transfer portal and NIL have proven to be. More and more, Clemson fans have begun to turn on Swinney as well.
Now I wonder if Swinney sees the writing on the wall, too. Nobody can deny what he’s accomplished. He’s been one of the greatest coaches of his era and did things with Clemson that nobody else has. But that will only carry you so far. Once fans taste success, it’s difficult to swallow anything else.
Fornelli also compared Swinney’s current situation to the twilight era of Bobby Bowden at Florida State and noted that Swinney is officially “feeling the heat”:
The situation reminds me of the late Bobby Bowden era at Florida State. Bowden was the greatest coach in program history. He won two national titles, and from 1987-2000, the Seminoles won at least 10 games every season. But then came an 8-4 in 2001 and 9-5 in 2002. The Noles still won the ACC, but after returning to 10-3 in 2003, they never won 10 games again under Bowden. Still, Bowden hung on to the job through the 2009 season because he was Bobby Bowden, and Bobby Bowden was Florida State.
It’s hard to associate Clemson football with anybody other than Dabo Swinney much the same way. But for how much longer? For the first time since his early tenure, Swinney’s starting to feel the heat.
Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian is No. 2 in the Week 2 Anxiety Rankings, followed by Michigan quarterback Bryce Underwood, the Big Ten, and then the ACC overall:
I wrote about this in the CFP Vibe Check earlier this week, but the ACC’s hopes of getting an at-large into the College Football Playoff field took a pretty big hit in Week 1. While the SEC, Big Ten and Big 12 combined to go 6-3 in nonconference games against Power Four competition, the bulk of that damage came at the expense of the ACC.
It went 1-5.
This week, the league plays five more games against Power Four teams. Another poor performance would make things extremely difficult. The league would essentially be looking at a scenario in which Miami needs to finish the regular season 12-0, and then somebody like SMU or Virginia (neither plays Miami, but they do play each other) goes 11-1. In that scenario, even the loser of the ACC Championship still has a decent shot at getting one of the 12 spots, but even that wouldn’t be guaranteed.