Dabo Swinney spent Clemson’s off week examining how his team has started the season 1-3.
After beginning the 2025 season in the top 10 of the AP Top 25, Clemson lost to LSU and has lost to Georgia Tech and Syracuse in back-to-back weeks. On Tuesday, Swinney said he felt that the season — so far — has been best summarized as “a coaching failure.”
“It’s just been a coaching failure, honestly,” Swinney said. “That’s the best way I can say it. We have just failed as coaches. I’m not taking accountability away from the players, they got accountability in this too. You’ve got some guys that have got to play better. They’re not just on scholarship any more. Some of these guys are paid a lot of money to perform and everybody’s got accountability, but it’s just an absolute coaching failure. I don’t know another way to say it.
“And I’m not pointing the finger, I’m pointing the thumb. It starts with me because I hire everybody and I empower everybody and I equip everybody and when players don’t play to their potential to me that’s coaches. That’s on us.”
After scoring nearly 35 points per game in 2024, Clemson is averaging less than 20 per game through the first third of the season. The Tigers rank 116th out of 136 teams in points per game despite an offense that’s still averaging 5.7 yards per play.
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The defense is approximately 23 points per game for the second straight season. After Clemson was gashed on the ground repeatedly in 2024, the Tigers made a defensive coordinator change and hired former Penn State defensive coordinator and ex-Indiana head coach Tom Allen to run the defense.
“It’s football stuff, it’s just football stuff,” Swinney said when asked about his team’s shortcomings. “It’s truly football stuff. It’s making a third-down catch. It is playing your gap. It is the proper angle. It’s playing over the top instead of underneath. It’s football stuff that we have to do a better job of. It’s decision making — the read tells me to give it, I give it. Just doing what we’re coaching you to do and when it’s not happening, that’s on us as coaches.”
Saturday, the Tigers visit North Carolina in a game that has lost a ton of luster over the first five weeks of the season but isn’t any less meaningful. Clemson is looking to avoid an 0-3 start in the ACC while Bill Belichick’s North Carolina has been blown out by TCU and UCF, the two power conference programs it has faced in its 2-2 start.
The game is just the second between a coach who has multiple national championships and another coach who has won multiple Super Bowl titles.
“It’s amazing, I never in my lifetime thought I’d get an opportunity to coach against Coach Belichick,” Swinney said. “How cool is that? … He’s arguably the greatest ever, you know? Certainly at the pro level.”
