Is Dabo Swinney taking notes about what happened in Stillwater, Okla., this week?
This is always how it ends: unceremoniously, swiftly and without a hint of emotion despite all those late nights and joyous moments.
Mike Gundy was fired on Tuesday afternoon by Oklahoma State, and the message sent by that school’s administration should ring loudly around the halls at one of the other schools in the sport that proudly wears a shade of orange.
Swinney is not above being pushed out the door in the same manner eventually. In fact, he should probably expect it if results continue apace based on how this season has gone.
A close loss to LSU in a game that was within your grasp was disappointing, but something that ultimately could be overcome. Getting walked off at Georgia Tech and looking uncompetitive against Syracuse, which needed overtime to top UConn, is an entirely different story for one of the three active head coaches who sport a national title ring on their fingers.
“We’re not going to win the national championship this year, but that doesn’t mean we can’t win the season,” Swinney said Monday. “Doesn’t mean we can’t finish well and doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy the journey.”
Enjoying the journey is a far cry from this summer, where he grinned extra wide when talking about this season’s Tigers during ACC media days and even espoused the goal of being the first 16–0 team in the sport.
Now, he’s 1–3 and facing an uphill battle to be more than 6–6 the way the team has played so far.
That’s on Swinney, both in terms of how it got to this point and where it goes from here.
Start with the roster, which is considered the fifth best in the sport overall and eight spots better than the next best ACC team, according to the 247Sports’s Team Talent Composite. Mock drafts weren’t off base in stacking Tigers up and down the first round either. The scouts were drooling over the prospect of seeing T.J. Parker, Peter Woods and Cade Klubnik after another offseason of work.
Depending on how you count them, 16 starters were back from a conference champion and College Football Playoff team. Thinking that the group could do better than it did the year before wasn’t misguided, it was smart in an age where upward of 60% of a roster turns over from season to season.
If that same group, which clearly has talent and has proven it between the lines, underperforms, then there’s only one place where the buck needs to stop in terms of putting the blame.
There was also a lot made this year about Swinney’s new strategy for his program. While he wasn’t ever going to get to the level of Texas Tech in terms of dipping into the transfer portal, Clemson surely dabbled. It’s paid off in defensive end Will Heldt, the 41st player in the class according to 247 Sports, who has been the team’s best player so far in 2025.
The issue is that Swinney didn’t go far enough in using the modern roster-building mechanism that all his peers have made commonplace.
If there were still question marks about the offensive line, why weren’t the Tigers involved in trying to land Howard Sampson when he was leaving North Carolina? If you wanted more depth at wide receiver, how did the ACC favorites let KC Concepcion leave the league for Texas A&M or completely whiff on Georgia Tech’s Eric Singleton Jr. winding up at Auburn?
It’s one thing to keep talking about competing for championships, it’s another to actually start paying for them. Clemson isn’t broke on this front, but it also is not as competitive as it thinks it is.
If things keep rolling down this track, perhaps it will be Swinney, like Gundy last year, who has to start rerouting some of his $11.3 million salary to the players he once said a decade ago shouldn’t be paid at all.
Though the Clemson coach has subtly shifted his stance on that subject, the results reflect the same stubborn coach who would rather be the last to adopt something instead of the first.
Clemson has lost nine times to unranked teams in the past five years and only upset a higher ranked opponent in three games during that same span. For a coach who has plastered “Best is the standard” all around the Clemson football facility, that’s hardly living up to it.
Gundy’s swift exit just two years removed from playing for a league title should be another wake-up call for Swinney that continuing on this same path is a surefire way to start living that buyout life before he ever anticipated. If he doesn’t believe it, his old rival Jimbo Fisher can probably add another data point.
“If they want me gone, if they’re tired of winning, they can send me on their way,” Swinney said a few days before getting tripped up by Syracuse. “I’m gonna go somewhere else and coach.”
Clemson isn’t tired of winning though, it’s tired of not winning.
It is tired of talking like a national championship contender before being forced to walk around like the Gator Bowl doesn’t sound swell right now. You think the boosters who have enjoyed all those trips to the Sugar Bowl and Orange Bowl around New Year’s Day aren’t thinking about diverting their funds to a nice vacation in the Caribbean instead of pondering what Swinney looks like in a giant sombrero at the Sun Bowl?
Swinney will one day have a statue of his likeness outside Death Valley, complete with a time where all those warm and fuzzy feelings can be fondly remembered of going toe-to-toe with Nick Saban and Alabama—and winning. He’ll be rightfully trumpeted for his ability to will an underachieving southern power and turn it into a championship program, authoring a borderline dynasty that was the envy of pretty much everybody outside his own alma mater.
But until that time rolls around, Swinney is still a coach tasked with getting his current team to win games. Sentimentality only lasts so far in college football nowadays, and this week should serve as a nudge to remember that.
Swinney can still be like Saban and constantly reinvent himself to keep on winning at the highest levels. He can pull a page out of Darrell Royal’s playbook and find his own version of the Wishbone to jumpstart another run in the second half of his tenure.
Or he can be like Bobby Bowden, Mack Brown, Phillip Fulmer, Gary Patterson, and, now, Gundy, in not recognizing the oncoming train and figuring out ways to sidestep it.
“I’m human. I’m not a cyborg. This is my life,” Swinney said after the loss to the Orange. “I’ve been here 23 years. I love this place. I give this place the best I’ve got every single day.”
Best is the standard at Clemson because Swinney has ensured that’s the case. Despite all the flowering talk from its head coach, it’s not being met at the moment.
If that doesn’t change, Swinney could find himself in the same situation Gundy did right up until he had the meeting telling him the end was finally here.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Why Mike Gundy’s Firing Should Be a Wake-Up Call for Dabo Swinney.