while I agree with you that Dabo could’ve done a few things differently, I also want to ask why you have to sacrifice your beliefs in today’s warped leftist takeover? If you truly believe that you aren’t racist and have done nothing but help black kids your entire coaching career, why do you have to 100% capitulate to the mob in order to gain favor with a few Whimsical 17 and 18 year olds? Dabo isn’t racist, and maybe he believes that bending the knee will only lead to more demands that he’s not willing to make in the future. I ask this, what have radical leftist and BLM done so far that makes you think they will stop demanding more and more? No one can answer that because the goal post keep moving constantly with these clowns because it has become a political movement to overthrow the Democratic system instead of a push for equality. Anyone who can’t see that is truly naive.
Washington Post article with recruiting tidbits
- Thread starter PartyLikeIts2016
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while I agree with you that Dabo could’ve done a few things differently, I also want to ask why you have to sacrifice your beliefs in today’s warped leftist takeover? If you truly believe that you aren’t racist and have done nothing but help black kids your entire coaching career, why do you have to 100% capitulate to the mob in order to gain favor with a few Whimsical 17 and 18 year olds? Dabo isn’t racist, and maybe he believes that bending the knee will only lead to more demands that he’s not willing to make in the future. I ask this, what have radical leftist and BLM done so far that makes you think they will stop demanding more and more? No one can answer that because the goal post keep moving constantly with these clowns because it has become a political movement to overthrow the Democratic system instead of a push for equality. Anyone who can’t see that is truly naive.
Plus BLM is a Marxist organization that doesn’t believe in the nuclear family. Plus they’ve been take over by white anarchist.
Gosh, I honestly don't know how some of the people in this thread function. It must be incredibly difficult to exist in a state of de facto hostility to any viewpoint that is the slightest bit critical of your program or coach.
Dabo Swinney is an incredible person. He is an incredible coach. He has also struck a chord, publicly, on certain issues that were tone deaf or at bare minimum not smart from an optics perspective.
For this reason, the "I'm just a football coach" bit rings a little hollow. You can't say "well I'm just a football coach" now, when over the course of your career you've made it a habit to be outspoken on social issues before.
He and we will be fine. But he is the highest paid coach in the history of college athletics. That alone makes a closer look at him and his program fair game.
No he didn’t. Dabo didn’t do anything wrong, besides not firing Pearman 3 years ago.
A few new details for me. But I havent dug into this whole deal.
article definitely had a slant to it. But not enough to really take away the ultimate message.
Trotters Mom ultimately says that Dabo’s responses fell short. But she knows he is a good man. And this was a serious statement. Not just calling him good.
but hearing the accounts of CJ and Woody meeting with Dabo should be good recruiting points for the future.
woody’s comment that Dabo’s first response was not the right time for a Christian testimony was right on.
Dabo is a good Christian man and he truly believes he can always just fall on his faith for protecting his pov. But this was a time where he wasnt battling those that attack his faith. While I agree with Dabo that it is a sin problem, his response showed how out of touch he was.
but the subsequent meetings and conversations lead me to believe that Dabo has grown through all of this. And I havent seen another coach who has appeared to fully try and grow from all of this.
dabo is so lucky to have Woody in his inner circle and I believe he is finally growing from some of his non football experiences.
the whole Football Matters shirt continues to be one of the dumbest media rabbit holes I have ever seen.
article definitely had a slant to it. But not enough to really take away the ultimate message.
Trotters Mom ultimately says that Dabo’s responses fell short. But she knows he is a good man. And this was a serious statement. Not just calling him good.
but hearing the accounts of CJ and Woody meeting with Dabo should be good recruiting points for the future.
woody’s comment that Dabo’s first response was not the right time for a Christian testimony was right on.
Dabo is a good Christian man and he truly believes he can always just fall on his faith for protecting his pov. But this was a time where he wasnt battling those that attack his faith. While I agree with Dabo that it is a sin problem, his response showed how out of touch he was.
but the subsequent meetings and conversations lead me to believe that Dabo has grown through all of this. And I havent seen another coach who has appeared to fully try and grow from all of this.
dabo is so lucky to have Woody in his inner circle and I believe he is finally growing from some of his non football experiences.
the whole Football Matters shirt continues to be one of the dumbest media rabbit holes I have ever seen.
I thought it was fair and balanced. The comments from Spiller, McCorvey, and Ms Trotter are telling.
I thought this was interesting. Seems like McCovery didn't know about the incident 3 years ago. Wonder how many did or didn't know until Tuttle mouthed off:
Just he and I, one-on-one,” McCorvey says. He prefers to keep most of the conversation’s details private, but he says he told Swinney that his initial comments after Floyd’s death were insufficient — that it hadn’t been the time for Christian testimony. McCorvey also confronted Pearman after he admitted to using the n-word. “Shoot yeah, I said something to him. Sure did.”
Interested in sharing?
“Nope,”
Quit reading post when I saw email address of Washington Post.
Nick Sandmann and his $250mm respectfully disagree with your opinion about the Post
I think overall it was a good article, but I think a little bit of context on the Football Matters shirt should probably have been included.
Obviously, it wasn’t a smart thing to wear in the midst of all this, but I think everyone can identify with throwing on some random shirt when you’re going on the lake.
Obviously, it wasn’t a smart thing to wear in the midst of all this, but I think everyone can identify with throwing on some random shirt when you’re going on the lake.
You must not read the Washington Post's articles without liberal glasses on. They are about as biased as you can get when it comes to their agenda, especially politically, which is 98% of what they write these days. When I see some of the things they take a stand for, I can't help but say to myself, are these people just flat out stupid??? And stupid can't be fixed??? Their biased journalism (well not really journalism but activism) shows itself even in this, when they have a Gamecock write an article about Clemson.
Who was the injured player in Pittsburgh they were flying to see?
Also, this line from the author is a crock of shit- “Which, they wanted to ask, ultimately matters more to Swinney — black lives or football?“ GTFOH.
Also, this line from the author is a crock of shit- “Which, they wanted to ask, ultimately matters more to Swinney — black lives or football?“ GTFOH.
There are going to be a lot of uncomfortable people on TI come Nov. 4 when it will clear a new president will occupy the White House in Jan 2021. One can support Black Lives Matter and not be a Marxist. One can be a White leader for anti racism and not be an anarchist. One can read the Washington Post sports section and not think the department is controlled by the “Squad” on Capitol Hill. Go Tigers.
Yes, quite uncomfortable. With Biden going full Bernie. To change your line a bit, it's possible to not be a Marxist and still be a socialist. Green New Deal, more regulations, more taxes.
You can support change without going full in on this crazy "the world won't be here in 10 years". You think Nancy Pelosi cares about anything other than power? I am sure you can say the same about Mitch McConnell. I don't like ANY politicians, but I am against socialism.
The Washington Post is a fish wrapper. They are a leftest leaning newspaper much like the New York Times and media outlets like CNN, MSMBC. NBC etc. Their one goal is to fundamentally change the USA we live in today. They want to tear down all that is good and replace it with Socialism and chaos. If one can’t see this then God help us all. With the reforms the radical left wants to bring to our country, it won’t be long that we are the next Venezuela. They don’t care who it hurts as long as they are in power. Dabo just happens to be the one they are after because he is on top and is a Christian. It is not what he didn’t say, but his religious beliefs are what is on trial. If the left gets power in Nov., it won’t mater what any coach says are didn’t say, there won’t be anymore college football
Disagree, and if you read the article there are others that disagree with you. Dabos first statement was basically him being tone deaf and not understanding the situation (something he has admitted). Although the shirt he wore wasn’t wrong, he completely lacked situational awareness. Both of those were mistakes.
I disagree that this is a good or even fair article. Players that are recruited and or coached by Dabo and his staff, on and off the field, are very fortunate! Not sure some, I mean only some, don't realize just how fortunate they are! This is what disappoints me the most.
It hasn't been a good week for The Washington Post.
I always laugh when I see this because why would Jeff Bezos want Socialism and chaos? He has everything to lose by the US becoming a socialist country.
Don’t worry about the future of Christianity under Joe Biden. He’s a practicing Catholic (frequently attends my parish when he is in Washington). And I will be happy to wager you a beer that college football will be around in 2021, 2022, 2023 and beyond. Tell you what: you buy me a beer every year Clemson plays football and I will buy you a six pack if Clemson doesn’t play due to the permanent discontinuation of college football.
Deal?
It’s a really in depth, well-reported and balanced look.
makes clear that Swinney has worked hard to build a family-friendly culture and a program that truly cares about it’s players.
And also gives an honest accounting of Swinney’s initial out-of-touch response to the Floyd murder and subsequent protests - and how that was perceived by African Americans involved with the program from McCorvey to Spiller to Jeremiah Trotter’s mom.
as someone who found Swinney’s initial response extremely troubling, this actually made me feel a little better. It seems like he’s genuinely listening to people like Spiller and McCorvey. It’s also clear those folks co to us to have skepticism and want to see him back it up, which is also pretty much where I am.
Be you conservative or liberal, this is well worth a read.
Setting aside right and wrong for a second (which, to be clear, is still the most important thing IMO), what Swinney does on this moving forward is going to have a big impact on the program, starting with his ability to get and keep recruits.
so if folks want to be triggered snowflakes, keep a closed mind and their head in the sand, ignore this article and this issue and simply bitch about those darn evil libs, that’s their right, I suppose. But they’re doing themselves a real disservice - and, quite frankly, embarrassing themselves.
As a godless liberal, let me just thank you for this thoughtful and honest take.
I disagree with conservatives on many issues, but I’ll never disrespect anyone for being conservative (or religious) if they’re honest and consistent about their beliefs, and willing be open-minded to the fallibility fellow conservatives.
But I’ve got no time for conservative snowflakes who want to just brush of anything the least bit inconvenient to their world view as made up by some non-existent liberal media conspiracy.
and that goes for sone of the Bernie Bro crazies on the left too.
Doesnt every school have some ties to some form of founders with a past associated to slavery? I dont know how any school in the east to the mid south wouldnt have something that could be (in present day PC culture) viewed as a negative association?
And that’s basically what the article lays out.
good man who cares about his players but has had a huge blindspot here.
yet instead of reading the article with an open mind, you proclaim it’s part of a liberal attack on Clemson?
Man, this is post is the definition of projection. Talk about “warped,” oh boy.
and overthrow the Democratic system? I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it was liberals sending secret police into cities to make extra-Constitutional arrests. Or trying to prevent Americans from voting. Or laying the groundwork to challenge the electoral shellacking that’s coming.
You’re quite the snowflake.
Looks like this snowflake gets triggered easily. And is totally detached from reality.
It must be exhausting living in the Fox News bubble.
federal troops have a right to protect federal buildings faggit, so stop being a bitch
You can say you were disappointed by his initial response but 'extremely troubling' to me is a bit much. And I am not sure what more he can do for his players than he already does.
What really pisses me off though is that Nick Saban and Kirby Smart haven't really said a darn thing about racism and will get rid of black players in a second if if improves their chances of winning. But no, it's Dabo taking ALL the arrows for white coaches. It's a joke. Kent Babb knew exactly what he was doing here.
Like mistakes he has made on the field get corrected, so will his mistakes off the field. It’s gonna hurt for a while, but we will be fine.
Weren’t you reading that Robin DiAngelo book? Seems more than a little masochistic. I don’t know that the current version of “anti-racism,” as embodied in many of the things associated with this whatever you mean by “Black Lives Matter” is going to do anything but cause worse racial division because of its obsession with racial classification.
John McWhorter didn’t think much of it: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
A. Sure, that’s why they’re there
B. So you’re a triggered snowflake and a homophobic bigot? That explains a lot.
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to be clear, I think both Smart and Saban are assholes.
but that’s a straw man argument if I’ve ever heard one.
Dabo took it upon himself to do things like day he’d quit football if payers got plaid and to go out of his way to attack Kaepernick.
He’s the highest paid coach in America and he presents himself as a paragon of Christian virtue.
I think he generally IS a good person, but he’s had a huge blond spot about race and he totally biffed this.
So the scrutiny is warranted, IMO. If you want to say the Sabans and Smarts if the world deserve their own scrutiny too, you’ll find no argument from me. But that doesn’t make this article illegitimate.
Thanks for copy and pasting, but I’d suggest putting it in a spoiler next time. That way, it doesn’t fill up a lot of space.What matters most to Dabo Swinney? Black Clemson players, past and future, want to know.
By
Kent Babb
July 24, 2020 at 9:45 a.m. EDT
CLEMSON, S.C. — The construction crew is up early on Centennial Boulevard, hardhats on and equipment whirring. Clemson University seems to be always updating something, and on this July morning, it’s a $75 million modernization of its ancient electrical system.
In May, it was an outdoor education center, added to a rural campus with some buildings more than a century old. This summer, the final touches are being put on a sleek new business school. For the most part, this fusion of past and future works.
Nowhere is this on better display than on the campus’s Athletic District, where progress feels never-ending: a $12 million tennis facility here, a $14 million softball stadium there. But the true showpieces are those assembled by the most dynamic builder these parts have ever known.
Dabo Swinney hasn’t just constructed one of college football’s best programs, winner of two of the last four national championships. He’s invigorated the economies of the campus and the town while overseeing $88 million in upgrades to Clemson’s football facilities. Since 2013, multiple renovations to Memorial Stadium have added embellishments such as an “oculus” in the shape of the College Football Playoff trophy, and the program’s new football facility includes a bowling alley, bocce ball court and nap room.
Someday, some former players believe, the school will inevitably commission another project: a statue of Swinney himself.
“He has literally changed that program,” says K’Von Wallace, a former Clemson safety who was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles in April. “It’s not even what he built; it’s the heart and genuineness behind it. It’s all out of pure love.”
But sometimes the ground shifts, threatening the foundations of even the strongest structures. On May 25, a shock wave that began in Minneapolis with the police killing of George Floyd rippled across the United States. A reinvigorated Black Lives Matter forced immediate reconsideration — and, often, the removal — of racist monuments and symbols. It also compelled Americans with powerful megaphones to speak up in ways they never had.
Former Clemson players Deshaun Watson and DeAndre Hopkins, two of the NFL’s biggest stars, publicly pressured the university to remove the name of John C. Calhoun from its honors college. Calhoun, a former U.S. senator and vice president, owned the cotton and timber plantation on which Clemson was built; he was a slaveowner who called the nation’s original sin a “positive good.” And “this oppressive figure,” Hopkins said, was the reason Hopkins never mentions Clemson when he’s introduced during nationally televised games.
The honors college dropped Calhoun. But the Calhoun Field farmland and Calhoun Drive — the lightly traveled road cuts through the heart of campus and runs past a building constructed with materials repurposed from slave quarters — remain. So does Tillman Hall, a stately brick structure built with what a sign describes as “an African-American convict labor crew," named for a “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, a politician who advocated for the lynching of black Americans.
"This is something that isn’t new to us,” says Wallace, who is black. “I knew the first day I got here what we stand on and what was built there.”
Wallace spoke up, too. So did Clemson’s star white quarterback, Trevor Lawrence, who helped organize a Black Lives Matter rally in this Southern town of about 17,000 year-round residents.
But even as Swinney’s extended football “family” took action, the coach — with perhaps the most influential voice in a state, and on a campus, still coming to grips with racist pasts — remained noticeably silent. When he finally spoke, during a Zoom meeting with reporters, he blamed what happened in Minneapolis on a “sinful, fallen world."
“For me,” Swinney said, “the good news is we have a Lord that loves us all.”
That meeting drew criticism for its apparent misunderstanding of the impact racism and police violence have on African Americans, who make up the majority of college football rosters but a sliver of coaching staffs. So did a photo that surfaced a few days later of the coach wearing a “FOOTBALL MATTERS” shirt. So did his decision, around the same time, to retain Danny Pearman, a 55-year-old white assistant coach who admitted to using the N-word during a practice in 2017.
“We dealt with it,” Swinney said in a video about Pearman’s use of the slur, “and we moved on.”
Some at Clemson couldn’t move on quite so easily. They tried to make sense of the Swinney they knew, whose heart and intentions serve as a bedrock to the football team’s success. They tried to square it against what he was now saying, and the incendiary things he’s said before, about social justice protests and paying amateur athletes. They whispered among themselves and thought about confronting Swinney.
Which, they wanted to ask, ultimately matters more to Swinney — black lives or football? But considering his $93 million contract, his power, and the influence he still holds in their lives, would he listen?
“We’re just a football program,” Swinney said in his video last month, “and I’m just a football coach.” But that’s not true. Not here. The 50-year-old coach once led a revolution in Clemson, tearing down something antiquated to rebuild it stronger than most anyone could imagine. Now, at a historic cultural crossroads and in the face of Swinney’s first major crisis, another question has emerged: Can Swinney, older and more emboldened and set in his ways, do it again?
“If Dabo is the face of down there, people are looking at him, and how he changes can affect how they possibly change," says Tammi Trotter, whose son Jeremiah Trotter Jr., a top high school recruit for the 2021 class, is committed, for now, to playing at Clemson. "Listen, Dabo got the side-eye from this mama. Right now it’s about going with your gut and feeling like: ‘Can I forgive this?’ ”
He used to sketch them on paper, these plans in his head: an indoor facility that didn’t yet exist, modifications to the stadium, an entryway that showcased Clemson’s history and trophies.
He went to university infrastructure meetings to share his ideas. He talked to colleagues about how he envisioned the future of Clemson football. He showed them his sketches, audacious even for Swinney.
“I was like: ‘Okay, yeah, this isn’t bad, what we’ve got right now,’” says Brad Scott, a former longtime Clemson assistant coach and administrator. “He just wanted to take it to a whole other level.”
When Swinney went from receivers coach to interim head coach in 2008, having never even been a coordinator, he was selected not just because he can dream big but because he can convince others these visions are achievable. As a wide-eyed assistant, Swinney had insisted on recruiting C.J. Spiller, a Florida native and the country’s best high school running back. Swinney’s colleagues suggested he focus on more realistic prospects. But the determined young coach — who once spent a sabbatical from football as an actual salesman — saw only a world in which Clemson had better players, facilities, championship hopes than even Florida and Florida State.
Swinney kept telling Spiller about his Christian faith and this landscape he imagined, and eventually the young running back committed — a signing that changed the course of Clemson history.
The Tigers won the Atlantic Coast Conference in 2011, their first championship in two decades, and Swinney kept asking to build things: $10 million for an indoor facility, $8 million for upgrades to Memorial Stadium’s west end zone, $25 million for suite renovations. Though Clemson athletics had never received a gift of more than $1 million before 2014, it had never had Swinney do the asking. He sat in living rooms and on porches to ask donors for $2.5 million apiece, and more and more, it seemed impossible for anyone to tell him no.
“As he became more successful, his voice just got stronger and stronger,” Scott says. “He’s never comfortable. He turns the page.”
The town tried to keep up, erecting new shopping malls, hotels and condominiums. Meanwhile, Swinney assembled the country’s most formidable coaching staff and made certain it was paid accordingly. In 2012, he deferred money he was due in pay raises to build up a $4.2 million salary pool for his assistants, the highest in college football.
“I make plenty of money,” Swinney told USA Today in 2012, when he was paid about $2 million. He declined The Washington Post’s requests for an interview for this story.
But players, he began saying a year later, deserved no such compensation. His beliefs on this would harden, suggesting that “professionalizing” college football would ruin the game by stimulating entitlement among players. He said he’d walk away from the sport if players are paid.
Swinney’s program, at least in his mind, was built on a simple foundation of God and football. The truth is he constructed it by being highly detailed, occasionally stubborn, universally demanding — but genuinely family-friendly. Swinney provides assistants 13-month calendars including spring breaks and days off, a rarity in a sport whose employees typically work around the clock. His coaches’ kids are encouraged to hang around the facility and treat it like a playground.
Swinney expects perseverance and dedication, and in return he promises a collegial working environment and extreme loyalty. In the last five years, four assistant coaches have left Clemson. Alabama and LSU, the last two non-Clemson national champions, have lost three and four assistants respectively in the last five months.
“What Coach Swinney did was bring a mindset that the best is the standard,” says Jeff Scott, who in December left Clemson to become South Florida’s head coach after a dozen years under Swinney as a player, position coach and coordinator. “It’s why coaches stick around.”
That and, of course, the national championships, the pay — the Tigers’ full-time staff of 10 assistant coaches are due $8.1 million in 2020 — and a university that, in its quest to win the sports-facility arms race, reliably manages to keep up with Swinney’s imagination.
“This was truly my dream,” he said in 2017, after the ribbon-cutting on Clemson’s $55 million football operations complex. Though soon Swinney was selling a new dream: $70 million in upgrades to Memorial Stadium. Last fall, the school’s board of trustees said yes.
There was so much Jeremiah Trotter Jr.’s mother liked about what Swinney has built: the “Paw Journey” program, which teaches career development and financial planning; the millionaire head coach’s open-door policy to current and former players; that 53 former Clemson players have been NFL draft picks over the last decade.
“I just felt comfortable,” says Tammi Trotter, whose husband, Jeremiah Sr., was a four-time NFL Pro Bowl linebacker. Jeremiah Jr., who ESPN ranks as its No. 1 outside linebacker for the 2021 recruiting class, verbally committed to Clemson last September.
She believes, too, that Swinney sees his players as whole people, not assets at his disposal. This allowed her to overlook some of the coach’s more questionable comments. In 2016, when former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick began taking a knee to protest racial injustice, Swinney criticized Kaepernick’s method of protest. He also suggested crime and police violence stem not from systemic racism but from a “sin problem," going on to say some activists “need to move to another country.”
Swinney admitted last month these statements were “harsh.” But he has refused to back down from his insistence that college athletes shouldn’t be paid, even as lawmakers and the NCAA move toward compensating them — and even as Swinney’s own pay has skyrocketed, thanks in large part to the free labor of a predominantly black workforce.
“You’re looking at these schools paying these coaches a lot of this money," Tammi Trotter says, "and it’s coming off the backs of these [players].”
Swinney likes to cite his own upbringing in extolling the value of scholarship athletes who attend college for free. He grew up poor in Alabama, the son of an alcoholic father. He believes God and Gene Stallings, his coach as a walk-on wide receiver at Alabama, changed his life through faith and the college experience. He cleaned gutters and was part of the football team’s brotherhood, starting him on a path that led him to this $9.2 million-a-year pulpit and his meticulously crafted kingdom.
“Life is tough,” Swinney told the Los Angeles Times in 2019. "And I’ve never wanted that for my players. I want young people who value that experience, who value education.”
He’s passionate about this, viewing it through a deeply personal lens. Though Swinney enjoys debate, one close friend says, he sometimes struggles with being wrong or even expanding upon a set of limited perspectives. Colleagues and players have nonetheless attempted to widen his world view over the years — perhaps no one more than Woody McCorvey, who coached Swinney at Alabama 30 years ago and now effectively acts as the coach’s chief of staff.
“Sometimes I think he says some things that — oh man, I don’t think I would’ve said that,” McCorvey says.
A 69-year-old black man, he grew up in Alabama, too, though it was a very different experience than the one Swinney would know and cherish. He has volunteered these stories to his boss, about the assassination of Jimmie Lee Jackson and the march from Selma to Montgomery, segregated water fountains and movie theaters.
“I’ve tried to educate him,” McCorvey says. “But he has not lived that like I have, and other black kids on this football team have, and their parents.”
Tammi Trotter has lived it, too. As this horrifying spring unfolded — first Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, then Breonna Taylor in Louisville, then Floyd — Trotter couldn’t help imagining her children in similar scenarios.
“When I send my son out the door,” she says, “I have to worry about this big, black young man with this big, thick head of hair, that somebody is not looking at him as a threat. No matter how gentle he is, I have to worry.”
She considered Swinney’s silence during the seven days between Floyd’s death and Swinney’s response. She was “definitely angry,” she says, after seeing Swinney posing with his “FOOTBALL MATTERS” shirt. And learning that Pearman had used a slur on Clemson’s practice field — and wasn’t fired for it — was a “hit in the gut,” she says.
Coaches scheduled a call with the Trotters, which Tammi believes was an attempt at damage control, and Swinney was on the line as yet another black American tried to get him to understand.
“I want you to look at my child as if you and your wife had birthed this person,” Tammi Trotter recalls saying. “If I’m hours away from you, I want to feel in my heart that he’s in a place where the people that I left him with will protect him.”
Clemson’s recruiting classes are routinely ranked among the nation’s best, and Swinney rarely loses committed players; between the classes of 2015 and 2020, zero recruits who’d verbally pledged to play for the Tigers changed their minds.
Two players in the 2021 class have done just that, most recently a cornerback named Jordan Hancock, who transferred to Ohio State. A person close to Hancock said Swinney’s response to the Floyd killing didn’t directly factor into Hancock’s decision. But last month, Hancock tweeted an anguished emoji when sharing a video of vehicles, adorned with Confederate flags, passing through Clemson in response to the Black Lives Matter rally on campus.
“A lot of these recruits now have started to think about the reality of what some of these colleges represent,” says the coach of a different Clemson recruit. The coach spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared reprisal from within the fraternal football recruiting community. “A lot of coaches that are going into a lot of these African American homes are going to have to answer some tough questions that they got away with not answering in the past.”
Tammi Trotter says her son has no intention of playing anywhere but Clemson — for now, anyway. “That man is good,” she says of Swinney.
But her initial comfort is shaken, and whether that remains the case depends on Swinney’s words and actions between now and when he signs his national letter of intent.
“Right now, hey, we’re still in the game,” she says. “I’m just praying that nothing occurs that would just derail us and have us say: ‘Nope, can’t take no more of this.’ ”
As the days after Floyd’s death turned to weeks, C.J. Spiller noted the protests — and his former coach’s response — and couldn’t sleep. He and Swinney had changed Clemson together 14 years earlier, setting the football program and themselves on extraordinary paths. But now, Spiller felt let down and anxious.
He wanted to talk to his old coach, but would Swinney be receptive? Would he be respectful and open-minded? Would he listen?
“We have a great relationship,” says Spiller, who spent eight seasons in the NFL before returning to Clemson last year to help lead fundraising for the athletic department. “But we’ve never had these conversations.”
Spiller typed thoughts on his phone’s notes app and scheduled a meeting in Swinney’s office. They prayed together, and then Spiller spoke first.
He asked about Pearman’s use of the slur. He then shared things he’d experienced: how isolated he sometimes felt at Clemson, how vulnerable he occasionally feels, how disconnected the football program keeps players from other black students. He closed by saying the division that has so far defined this year could be rewritten if Swinney and others have “20-20 vision" about the broken systems and notions surrounding them.
After their meeting, Swinney scheduled a gathering at his home with Clemson’s seniors. He invited them to share their experiences. He took calls, some of them tense, with black former players. He listened to McCorvey talk, words from employee to boss unfiltered, as they took a chartered flight to Pittsburgh to check on an injured player.
“Just he and I, one on one,” McCorvey says. He prefers to keep most of the conversation’s details private, but he says he told Swinney that his initial comments after Floyd’s death were insufficient — that it hadn’t been the time for Christian testimony. McCorvey also confronted Pearman after he admitted to using the N-word. “Shoot yeah, I said something to him. Sure did.”
“Nope,” he says before changing the subject, to the sound of birds singing outside his office window at Clemson’s football facility. His window overlooks terrain that has dramatically shifted over the centuries and is doing so again. “The thing to always look at is how my people endured all of this," McCorvey says. "Everything that they did to help build these buildings, and they didn’t get the recognition for it. And then giving me the opportunity to work at a place like this now …”
McCorvey trails off. He’s asked if his boss is capable of understanding that, and of updating his own views. Swinney, after all, is a part of the campus and culture now, an important monument to Clemson’s revitalization. And monuments, even in places like this, are either modified to reflect changing attitudes, or they get torn down.
“If you don’t,” McCorvey says of Swinney’s ability to adapt, “you’re going to be lost. Because every day, every year, you look at your players — they’re changing. And if you don’t change with them, you’re going to be lost.”
Spiller, too, is encouraged that Swinney is listening. He was heartened that, after their meeting, Swinney marched alongside Clemson players at the Black Lives Matter rally. He’s chosen to believe Swinney’s words, on his third attempt, were genuine.
Swinney spoke at a Black Lives Matter in June. (John Bazemore/Associated Press)
“I’m embarrassed to say there’s things on this campus that I didn’t really understand,” Swinney, wearing a black t-shirt and reading from prepared remarks, told the crowd assembled on the field in front of Tillman Hall. “I knew the basics, but not the details. But I’ve learned. And I’ve listened.”
On the day of their meeting, though, Spiller didn’t know what might come of it. He and Swinney stood and hugged when they finished, smiling as they attempted to move on. Then Spiller said goodbye and departed a structure that didn’t exist even a decade ago, thinking about how so many things around here look, and feel, so different than the way they used to.
