but I don’t know if he has the self-awareness, drive, and willingness to evolve for it to even matter…
I’ve been doing some thinking, not just over the last 48 hours, but for days and weeks, trying to really wrap my head around Dabo and Clemson’s approach to program building over the last couple of years. As most know, I am a staunch critic of our approach. I think we have been slow, to the point of outright negligence, in adapting to the new reality of college football. I think a lot of it is the result of a level of pride and an aura of invincibility from our head man that I have said and truly believe is absolutely a form of narcissism.
I don’t really think I need much proof of the above beyond a second consecutive home loss to our rival with playoff stakes on the line, this time likely for both of us. You don’t have to look any further than the truly abysmal staff we have assembled at so many levels to know that this program is no longer lead by someone who values excellence as the standard but instead values loyalty and obedience above all. The killer instinct that we once had to not just beat but dominate a truly overmatched opponent at home is no longer there. We lost to a single person on Saturday, a single person who is quite explosive but also quite limited.
I think that lack of killer instinct, discipline, preparation will once again be on display this coming Saturday, and I don’t have any reason to expect we will do anything other than lose as that’s all we’ve done the last couple of years whenever we play anyone worth a damn. I’ll be at the game and will do my part to be proven wrong, but I don’t know how anyone could point to a rationale reason to expect anything other than what we’ve seen lately.
However, I wanted to take a step back and look outside of the short-term, season or game-specific, issues we face, even looking beyond critical areas like staff management, and look more at college football as a whole. The landscape of college football has changed so much in the last couple of years, never more evident than this season’s absurdity, and I think there’s a very real chance that Dabo could actually stumble upon a real competitive advantage, if he is only willing to evolve and embrace some of the changes while staying true enough to his core that we can differentiate ourselves.
Watching football over the past couple of weeks, it’s clear to me that no one is very good. No one has the level of depth and the consistent performance that we saw in years past from Bama and Clemson and UGA. It’s not a surprise that this is happening when you think about the new dynamics associated with constant roster turnover and NIL. You’ve got teams with 10, 15, 20% of their starters being first-timers within the program. You have coaches trying to gain the attention of and push players who now have a brutal combo of both hundreds of thousands of dollars in their pocket but also the ability to transfer at the slightest sign of frustration or adversity. That’s an almost impossible combination to overcome when it comes to development.
We’ve all been 18. I can’t even imagine how big my head would be and how big of a POS I’d be if I had the money these kids now have at 18. You wouldn’t have been able to tell me nothing. I would’ve thought I was the wealthiest person in the world and that I would continue to be the wealthiest person in the world, and that is where Dabo (or someone in college football) has a real opportunity to distinguish themselves.
I’m not shaking a stick at a million dollars when you’re 18. That’s real, incredible money, but you’re not retiring off that. You’re not providing for your parents off that. That money can evaporate in an instant, and the amount of stories we’re gonna hear about that in the coming years will be staggering, guaranteed. The real money is in the NFL contract you sign or in the professional career you’ve set yourself up for through your degree. That will always be the life-changing money. This money is great, probably makes their college experience something I can’t even imagine, and surely helps a lot of these families in the short-term, but that’s all it is for 95% of these kids, even though they will feel like multi-millionaires.
Someone, and Dabo feels so uniquely positioned to do this, will recognize that the true goal is still developing into the type of elite player who gets into the NFL and signs that life-changing contract. That is the goal, and if it’s not, the degree and your career for the next 40 years is. The NIL and the college opportunities are great, but too many people, to quote Dabo, are sacrificing what they want most (life-changing NFL money) for what they want most in the moment ($500K as an 18 year-old). If he could just embrace NIL to the point where we are close to competitive with everyone else money-wise and then change his message to support this new reality, we really could standout amongst the short-term money whoring everyone else is doing.
Dabo has to accept two things:
Dabo feels so perfectly setup to be that person. We’re not asking him to embrace some blasphemous philosophy that would be unreasonable to expect him to embrace. We’re asking him to make relatively small changes within his philosophy and messaging that will allow him to have the type of continuity with players to develop them and mold them in the way I truly believe he feels is best for them. To do so, he must accept basic market forces and must accept that the route he took is not the only route people can take.
If he can do both of those things, I truly do think he could be setup for a resurgence. I never would have thought that before this season, but the inconsistent product on the field has made it clear to me that we will never see on-field dominance the way we used to. That Clemson team that destroyed Bama and that LSU team that toppled Clemson the following year, those are the best teams CFB will ever see. I truly believe that. We couldn’t but fortunately won’t have to be able to compete with those teams ever again. We will have to compete with a lower quality of play that I do think we can standout if we figure out that blend between competitiveness in NIL / transfers while also embracing the long-term value of a culture of development leading to the best eventual outcome for the players. That combination is how we take the culture Dabo has built and really elevate it with the new world of college football. If we can do that, we can still compete and even thrive. If we don't, this program will continue to regress.
I’ve been doing some thinking, not just over the last 48 hours, but for days and weeks, trying to really wrap my head around Dabo and Clemson’s approach to program building over the last couple of years. As most know, I am a staunch critic of our approach. I think we have been slow, to the point of outright negligence, in adapting to the new reality of college football. I think a lot of it is the result of a level of pride and an aura of invincibility from our head man that I have said and truly believe is absolutely a form of narcissism.
I don’t really think I need much proof of the above beyond a second consecutive home loss to our rival with playoff stakes on the line, this time likely for both of us. You don’t have to look any further than the truly abysmal staff we have assembled at so many levels to know that this program is no longer lead by someone who values excellence as the standard but instead values loyalty and obedience above all. The killer instinct that we once had to not just beat but dominate a truly overmatched opponent at home is no longer there. We lost to a single person on Saturday, a single person who is quite explosive but also quite limited.
I think that lack of killer instinct, discipline, preparation will once again be on display this coming Saturday, and I don’t have any reason to expect we will do anything other than lose as that’s all we’ve done the last couple of years whenever we play anyone worth a damn. I’ll be at the game and will do my part to be proven wrong, but I don’t know how anyone could point to a rationale reason to expect anything other than what we’ve seen lately.
However, I wanted to take a step back and look outside of the short-term, season or game-specific, issues we face, even looking beyond critical areas like staff management, and look more at college football as a whole. The landscape of college football has changed so much in the last couple of years, never more evident than this season’s absurdity, and I think there’s a very real chance that Dabo could actually stumble upon a real competitive advantage, if he is only willing to evolve and embrace some of the changes while staying true enough to his core that we can differentiate ourselves.
Watching football over the past couple of weeks, it’s clear to me that no one is very good. No one has the level of depth and the consistent performance that we saw in years past from Bama and Clemson and UGA. It’s not a surprise that this is happening when you think about the new dynamics associated with constant roster turnover and NIL. You’ve got teams with 10, 15, 20% of their starters being first-timers within the program. You have coaches trying to gain the attention of and push players who now have a brutal combo of both hundreds of thousands of dollars in their pocket but also the ability to transfer at the slightest sign of frustration or adversity. That’s an almost impossible combination to overcome when it comes to development.
We’ve all been 18. I can’t even imagine how big my head would be and how big of a POS I’d be if I had the money these kids now have at 18. You wouldn’t have been able to tell me nothing. I would’ve thought I was the wealthiest person in the world and that I would continue to be the wealthiest person in the world, and that is where Dabo (or someone in college football) has a real opportunity to distinguish themselves.
I’m not shaking a stick at a million dollars when you’re 18. That’s real, incredible money, but you’re not retiring off that. You’re not providing for your parents off that. That money can evaporate in an instant, and the amount of stories we’re gonna hear about that in the coming years will be staggering, guaranteed. The real money is in the NFL contract you sign or in the professional career you’ve set yourself up for through your degree. That will always be the life-changing money. This money is great, probably makes their college experience something I can’t even imagine, and surely helps a lot of these families in the short-term, but that’s all it is for 95% of these kids, even though they will feel like multi-millionaires.
Someone, and Dabo feels so uniquely positioned to do this, will recognize that the true goal is still developing into the type of elite player who gets into the NFL and signs that life-changing contract. That is the goal, and if it’s not, the degree and your career for the next 40 years is. The NIL and the college opportunities are great, but too many people, to quote Dabo, are sacrificing what they want most (life-changing NFL money) for what they want most in the moment ($500K as an 18 year-old). If he could just embrace NIL to the point where we are close to competitive with everyone else money-wise and then change his message to support this new reality, we really could standout amongst the short-term money whoring everyone else is doing.
Dabo has to accept two things:
- He has to accept that the market dictates pricing – I’ve said this 1000000 times, but his stance about not paying recruits more than starters is so patently absurd and narcissistic that it’s hard to even hear without shaking your head. Trevor and Deshaun would be worth more than anyone on our roster when we signed them. Nuk and Sammy would be worth more than every scrub starting WR we had combined when they were signed. That’s the absurd part of his believe, but even if you want to argue about the right or wrong of it, the simple fact of that matter is that the market, not Dabo Swinney, dictates pricing. It’s just economics. If I want to hire an engineer but all of my competitors play 2x more, I better get pretty damn close to that, or I don’t get him. If we need a LT, and that LT has been offered X amount of money by 5 other programs, how much we are paying our current LT has NOTHING to do with what he can be paid. The market has said he’s worth X, period. This is freshman year economics stuff. The belief that we can dictate pricing is a level of ego that’s just beyond comprehension.
- He has to accept that even though he wasn’t paid to play college football, there’s nothing wrong with others getting paid to do so – I really think Dabo, beyond his narcissism and maybe as sort of a tangential piece of his narcissism, believes that struggling in college, working hard, delaying gratification, and then moving on to millions in the NFL or to a professional career beyond football is the best route for each of his player’s development. I wouldn’t dispute the validity of this belief and think for a lot of kids he’d be correct, but I think this belief is so fundamental to him as it is the path that worked for him. I’ve met many people like Dabo who had to overcome so much to get where they are that often they almost become zealots to the path they took. They become like the Dave Ramsey’s of the world who believe there is one way and one way only to build wealth and anything else is foolish. Dabo simply has to truly accept in his heart that it’s ok for players to get paid in college. One of the best parts about Dabo is his genuine authenticity. Like it or not, you know where Dabo stands on just about anything because of his authenticity. It’s the reason why it’s been so clearly obvious to me that we don’t embrace NIL and transfers. Sure I’ve recently been able to talk to some people who know directly that we’re nowhere close to others, but I kept saying that all you had to do was listen to our coach to know he wasn’t embracing it. When Dabo Swinney believes in something, you know it, we all have seen it, and he simply does not believe in this structure.
Dabo feels so perfectly setup to be that person. We’re not asking him to embrace some blasphemous philosophy that would be unreasonable to expect him to embrace. We’re asking him to make relatively small changes within his philosophy and messaging that will allow him to have the type of continuity with players to develop them and mold them in the way I truly believe he feels is best for them. To do so, he must accept basic market forces and must accept that the route he took is not the only route people can take.
If he can do both of those things, I truly do think he could be setup for a resurgence. I never would have thought that before this season, but the inconsistent product on the field has made it clear to me that we will never see on-field dominance the way we used to. That Clemson team that destroyed Bama and that LSU team that toppled Clemson the following year, those are the best teams CFB will ever see. I truly believe that. We couldn’t but fortunately won’t have to be able to compete with those teams ever again. We will have to compete with a lower quality of play that I do think we can standout if we figure out that blend between competitiveness in NIL / transfers while also embracing the long-term value of a culture of development leading to the best eventual outcome for the players. That combination is how we take the culture Dabo has built and really elevate it with the new world of college football. If we can do that, we can still compete and even thrive. If we don't, this program will continue to regress.
