Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney expressed frustration with the state of officiating in college football this season, calling it “one of the worst years in my entire coaching career” in terms of refereeing across the sport.
Speaking to reporters ahead of the ACC Championship Game against SMU, Swinney pointed to several controversial calls and no-calls that have impacted games this year. Without naming specific teams, he referenced an egregious offside no-call, saying “I don’t know what game I was watching, but they said a guy was on the line, and I don’t know what game was that. Was it Alabama? Oh, my God. I mean, I’m like, you know, it’s like these are game-changing things, right?”
Swinney believes the core issues are a lack of full-time professional referees at the college level and an absence of transparency and accountability with replay reviews and controversial calls.
“You probably need full-time people doing it,” Swinney said of officiating major college football. “You know, these are big, big moments, you know, at this level. I mean, it’s big. You got some just unexplainable, unexplainable stuff.”
Dabo Swinney
While acknowledging that “anytime you have people involved, you’re going to have some mistakes,” Swinney feels many calls this season crossed a line.
“There’s been some just like, wow, I can’t believe that happened type moments, and then I think some of these reviews that have gone on, you know, there’s just not a lot of transparency,” he lamented.
Swinney’s solution is to standardize the officiating under the NCAA umbrella rather than have different approaches in each conference.
“I would think you’d probably ask any coach. That’s probably one thing all of us coaches probably agree on. You know, we probably all wish we had some type of standard, but we don’t,” said Swinney.
Dabo Swinney
The Clemson coach believes creating that uniformity and holding referees accountable would benefit the sport as a whole.
“This ain’t no hobby for us,” Swinney said of the coaches and players putting in immense work. “There’s always human, you know, anytime you have people involved, you’re going to have some mistakes, but those were like, there’s been some just like, wow, I can’t believe that happened type moments.”
While Swinney knows controversial calls have always been part of football, he thinks the egregious nature of some decisions this year necessitates changes to how the sport is officiated at its highest levels. Bringing refs under the NCAA structure could create more consistency.
Clemson Tigers vs SMU Mustangs
