Finebaum: Clemson is already less attractive under Dabo Swinney

Clemson University head football coach and two-time national champion Dabo Swinney continues to be one of the most stubborn men in college football — proclaiming last week that his Tigers were the only Power Four program to not take in a transfer this offseason.

Despite Swinney’s program trending in the wrong direction pretty much every year since the inception of the portal, and is starting to be passed even by other ACC teams, Swinney has stuck to his guns and refused to play ball when it comes to the portal and NIL.

ESPN and SEC Network analyst Paul Finebaum says Swinney’s outright refusal to get on board with the way college football is going is ultimately going to be his undoing, and brutally, that Clemson is already significantly less attractive to potential recruits than it was just a couple of years ago.

“…People who graduated from Clemson, people who are Clemson fans — and I run into a lot of them based on where I live [Charlotte] — and they don’t think Dabo Swinney is going to be there a long time. When I mean a long time, I mean 3-5 years. I think his time is nearly up,” Finebaum said during his weekly appearance on McElroy and Cubelic on Birmingham’s WJOX-FM.

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“To me, he is falling so far behind…Dabo Swinney may think he’s smart, playing this game of how it’s going to be, but that’s not the way things are. This week is indicative of that in college football. It has changed so quickly in the last three years, and if you missed a minute, you fell behind. He missed three years, and he is way behind and he’s not catching up.”

Finebaum when asked about Clemson’s appeal as a program in the expanded College Football Playoff era went on to break down the fact that Clemson is already less attractive than it was, and he doesn’t see it changing anytime soon.

“I think they’re already less attractive,” Finebaum said on the looming possibility of further conference realignment and how it would impact Swinney. “Clemson if you go back to 2016, 17, 18, they were at the epicenter…they weren’t that big of a name until then. Clemson has always been a good football school, but it’s never been a main attraction like an Alabama or Georgia or Texas or Michigan or Ohio State. Now they’ve fallen off of that and I think their biggest concerns are with their own league.”

Finebaum has never been high on Swinney. But it sounds like he is predicting the end of his time at Clemson and as one of the better coaches in college football to end sooner rather than later.