Swinney creates the un-Alabama at Clemson
Coach maintains family atmosphere at rural school
CLEMSON, S.C. — Not long after Clemson coach Dabo Swinney learned his top-ranked Tigers would face Alabama in the College Football Playoff semifinals on Jan. 1, he offered a playful complaint.
“I can’t seem to get away from these guys, as hard as I try,” Swinney said.
One could forgive any frustration on his part: Clemson has played Alabama, the dominant program of this era, in the past two national title games, with each team winning one of the extremely close contests.
But Swinney’s characteristically folksy remark actually masked a crucial truth: Swinney really has tried to get away from those guys. He has turned his program into the anti-Alabama, and in the process has lifted Clemson — what by many rights should be just another Southern school that likes football — to a competitive level unmatched by any other. Except, of course, Alabama.
That makes Clemson a notable outlier. With four national titles in the past eight seasons, Alabama under coach Nick Saban represents college football’s gold standard, and most rivals have tried to ape it to beat it.
But as so many teams have tried to catch up to the Crimson Tide,
Swinney, an Alabama alum who at 48 is a generation removed from the 66-year-old Saban, has gone his own way. He has displayed actual joy at winning. He has focused on recruiting locally. And he has embraced Clemson’s quirky side — its outof-the-way location, its goofy fans (they love to put little tiger tails on their trucks) — making his program a stark contrast to Alabama and its countless imitators.
“If Alabama’s the business decision and the NFL pipeline, Clemson is the family,” said Barton Simmons, director of recruiting for 247Sports, a digital bible for college football’s wonk set. “Dabo Swinney presents
his program in a very different light than you see at the more traditional powerhouses.”
Historically, college football has been extremely top-heavy. Since World War II, the teams that have finished in the top four of The Associated Press poll three years in a row, as Clemson seems likely to do, are a roll call of the game’s royal family. Nearly all rely on some combination of tradition; the prestige of a flagship university, with hundreds of thousands of proud alumni and state citizens among the faithful; and the warchest of a football-obsessed private institution.
But Clemson is a land-grant university of the 23rd-largest state, for years the poor sister to the University of South Carolina. It has 18,000 undergraduates, 20,000 fewer than Alabama. Before its current run, its football legacy comprised one national title (1981), several good years in the 1950s — and a lot of unjustified pride that helped fill the university’s 86,000-seat Memorial Stadium, known as “Death Valley.”
In place of the heritage that Alabama or Ohio State boasts, or the constant spotlight that Southern California and Notre Dame promise, Swinney talks about Clemson as a family, and about the peaceful quiet of the lake near the campus, and about how football is almost the only game in a town that boasts few distractions.
In 2015, wide receiver Ray-Ray McCloud made an official visit to Alabama weeks before national signing day.
“The way people communicated with each other, the way they smiled all the time, I felt it was a family atmosphere,” McCloud said last week.
Some might see the university’s remote geography, in an awkward western shoulder of South Carolina known as the Upstate, as a hindrance. Swinney understands its proximity to the interstate that connects Charlotte, N.C., and Atlanta, two growing metropolises that incubate plentiful football talent.