Coach Dabo Swinney emotional at the logo immediately following defeat
After a 34-21 setback to the Syracuse Orange, reality seemed to set in for Coach Swinney. He was seen emotional on the field immediately following Syracuse’s final kneel down.
With the loss, Coach Swinney started 1-3 for the first time in his entire tenure. Not only was the start unprecedented, Dabo simply seeing this many defeats has been rare. Swinney has lost more than three games exactly five times in his seventeen year career as a full time head coach, with two coming in the last two seasons. Pick any three year stretch from 2015-2019, and you will not find more than three defeats. Dabo has been one of the most successful head coaches in the last two decades, and the while he’s seen his fair share of losses, this setback seemed to weigh far heavier than ones in the past. Beyond coach Swinney’s personal history, Clemson as a whole had not had a start this disappointing in recent memory (last 1-3 start came in 2004). Relative to expectations, Clemson had not seen a season quite like this in generations. They entered the season ranked fourth in the AP poll, and even with stellar play are almost guaranteed to not see the top 25 until November.
When asked about his emotional response on the field following the game, Dabo gave a relatively heartfelt answer: “I’m human, I’m not a cyborg. This is my life man. For 23 years I’ve loved this place, I’ve given this place everything I’ve got every single day. Every day. There hasn’t been a day where I haven’t given Clemson everything I had. And it hurts. I’ve invested my life here. I don’t get the job done, I’m responsible, and I feel pain. It’s not just my pain, I feel everybody’s pain, and that comes with my job. I’ve been in these situations many times, I’ve had a lot of great days and this is a very very low day.”
Coach Swinney has never been in this exact position before, and that seemed to show throughout the interview. However, while disappointed in the past, Swinney remained confident in the team’s future; “I also know that we’ll get through it. And there will be a lot more great days. I know no one wants to hear that at this moment but that’s what drives me, being able to look back at different moments of my career and see we got through it, we got better, and there’s a lot of great days.”
While failure has been nearly foreign to Coach Swinney throughout his tenure, this is a unique challenge for the veteran coach. Dabo has never had to rally a team this far from legitimacy, and how he adjusts in the short term and adapts in the long term will be absolutely vital to his career and legacy. Let all Clemson fans hope that Coach can bring this team some semblance of success this season, and can find a way to eventually make their way back to the iconic Clemson teams we’ve seen in the past.
