Dabo Swinney has faced harsh criticism before at Clemson, but his fight back looks different now

IT HAD BEEN a couple of years since Bob Stoops last spoke with Clemson coach Dabo Swinney. The two had always been friendly, but since Stoops retired from coaching at Oklahoma, they didn't bump into each other often.

Then, on Halloween, Stoops was scrolling through his phone when he came across some quotes from Swinney.

A caller to Swinney's radio show -- "Tyler from Spartanburg" -- had offered a meandering critique of Swinney's performance in 2023, suggesting, among other things, that the Clemson coach hadn't earned his nearly $11 million salary after the team's 4-4 start to the season.

Swinney responded with what he'd later call "an Old Testament answer."

Among Swinney's scathing rebukes:

"It's people like you, where the expectation is greater than the appreciation -- you're part of the problem."

"People like you who just love to destroy people with your comments, all right? I'm sure you've never made any bad decisions. I'm sure you've lived a perfect life."

"All this bullcrap you're thinking, all these narratives you read. Listen, man, you can have your opinion all you want, and you can apply for the job. And good luck to ya."

"I'm not gonna sit here and let you call in -- I don't care how much money I make. You ain't gonna talk to me like I'm 12 years old. Gotta be freaking kidding me."

Stoops read through the entire diatribe and couldn't resist sending Swinney a note.

It read: "Good for you."

Turns out, Swinney's rant struck a chord with Stoops and dozens of other coaches across the country.

It can be a difficult dichotomy for coaches. They're rich and famous and, even when they fail miserably, they're rewarded with hefty buyout checks (see: Fisher, Jimbo), so few people feel particularly sorry for them when they're buried under an avalanche of criticism. But eventually the constant refrain of fan frustrations can become overwhelming and risk, as Swinney pointed out, "stealing the love" of the job.

And as Clemson, winners of four straight after Swinney's radio rant, gets set to take on Kentucky in the TaxSlayer Gator Bowl (Noon ET on ESPN), it's up for debate how much his words helped dissipate the pressure surrounding his team, but they certainly made an impact on plenty of coaches around the country.

"I don't even really know what I said," Swinney suggested in the days after his comments to Tyler from Spartanburg. "But I apparently said something that hit a nerve with some people in my profession. So if one positive came from it, I got a chance to meet some new people and encourage a lot of coaches out there. Some very prominent people and a lot of current and former coaches took it upon themselves to get my number and reach out. It meant a lot to me -- to hopefully encourage and uplift some guys that I think are kind of in the fight in where they are in their career right now."

MACK BROWN HAS reached something of an armistice with fans. He's 72, and this new, occasionally fragile, peace is a recent development. They can complain and criticize, Brown said, and he'll listen. But ultimately, he'll move on from it because it's the only way to cope.

This wasn't Brown's strategy during his time at Texas. Back then, he was engaged with players and politicians and donors and administrators and fans, all of them wanting -- demanding, perhaps -- the same thing: wins.

Brown was at the center of a massive economic machine called Texas football, and that machine was fueled by victories. For years, Brown kept the machine well fed, winning a national title at the end of the 2005 season and playing for another to wrap 2009. But his final years in Austin were fraught: 5-7, 8-5, 9-4 and 8-5 in 2013 before he was shown the door. It was a four-year stretch in which every win was a necessity, and every loss was devastation. By the end, Brown told ESPN in 2019, there was little joy even in victory. Just relief.

"I got stuck in that hole where winning becomes everything," said Brown, who's now the head coach at North Carolina, "and that's a very dangerous and dark hole."

At the bottom of that hole is the place Swinney promised to avoid, where the love of the job is replaced by the burdens that come with it. Fending off that mindset occasionally requires an intervention with your own fan base.

NC State coach Dave Doeren hoped to remind his fans of that slippery slope after a 24-21 win over Virginia in September, and the fans were angry. The Wolfpack's offense sputtered and hapless Virginia had nearly pulled an upset. The mood was somber as Doeren settled in for his postgame media session.

"S---, be happy we won," Doeren said. "People want to bitch at playcalling, and this, that and the other. There's other stuff going on, man. We found a way to win on the road against an inspired football team."

What fans saw, however, was weakness, signs of a team inching up on the precipice of disaster.

A week later, NC State was up 10-0 at halftime at home against a then-unranked Louisville, and walking off the field, the Wolfpack were immersed in a chorus of boos.

NC State ended up losing that game, but Doeren didn't allow the ship to sink in the aftermath. The Wolfpack rallied and finished the regular season 9-3.

"The expectations for a game in September, it's the end of the world for your season even when there's so much football to be played," Doeren said. "I think wins need to be celebrated, and the losses need to hurt. But it's not the end of the world."

Stoops recalled that for his first five or six years at Oklahoma, he didn't bother screening his radio calls. He wanted to hear what folks had to say and, given his remarkable success, the commentary was rarely negative. But every now and then, some comment would cut him deeply, and he'd go home and sulk until, one day, his wife posed a question: Why do you coach?

Stoops had a quick answer. He loved the job, loved the guys, loved the competition.

"So," his wife told him, "focus on that."

After that, the radio calls were screened, and Stoops had two staffers read his mail, throwing out anything overly negative before it reached his desk.

"You need to insulate yourself to protect your psyche," Stoops said.

STEVE SPURRIER WAS chatting with a friend, and out of nowhere he brought up Florida's 1998 overtime loss to Tennessee. The Gators had the game, but a missed kick on a chip shot in OT cost them. It has been 25 years, and as Spurrier recounted the final play to his friend, it still stung.

"Then I had to stop and sort of knock myself on the head and remind myself that Florida's got nine SEC championships in the history of the school, and our teams got seven of them," Spurrier said (counting an unofficial title from his first year in 1990). "So I guess we did pretty good."

And yet, when Spurrier left Florida after the 2001 season for a job with the NFL's Washington Redskins, he heard from more than a few Gators fans happy to see him move along. He had lost nine games in the three years leading up to his departure, finishing outside the top five twice, and, wild as it sounds, that represented a clear decline.

"It's human nature, I guess, when you've had a whole bunch of success and then you go a few years without and fans say, 'Well, he doesn't have it anymore,'" Spurrier said.

For Swinney, too, the past three years have represented signs of an aging infrastructure -- at least compared with the dizzying heights he'd reached in the preceding decade. After taking Clemson to the College Football Playoff in six straight seasons, Clemson missed out in 2021, 2022 and 2023. The team's fourth loss of 2023, which immediately preceded Tyler from Spartanburg's call, meant that the Tigers would fail to win 10 games for the first time since 2010 (though a bowl win would be victory No. 9). Clemson is still ranked in the AP poll, but it's toward the bottom of the list.

And this is the evidence upon which Swinney has been indicted for gross misconduct in the oversight of his team.

The charges:

"Some people say I'm stubborn," Swinney lamented in the aftermath of Tyler's call, "but I say I'm convicted in my beliefs, and there aren't enough people convicted in their beliefs."

And yet, Swinney has evolved.

After the 2022 Orange Bowl loss, Swinney parted ways with offensive coordinator Brandon Streeter to hire Garrett Riley from TCU, and when 2023 ended, he brought in longtime SEC and NFL assistant Chris Rumph and former Ole Miss head coach Matt Luke to his staff.

Swinney continues to argue in favor of the educational underpinnings of college sports, but Clemson is aggressive in the NIL space and has invested in retaining its players, even building the brick-and-mortar Clemson Athlete Branding facility to help players maximize their opportunities.

And while Swinney's biggest additions via the portal to date are backup QBs, he insists he's open to the right players if they're open to Clemson.

So, is he stubborn or convicted? The answer is probably a little of both, said Doeren, who compared Swinney's approach to conversations he has had with his own staff about holding true to core philosophies while adapting to an ever-changing marketplace.

"It's a balancing act," Doeren said. "You have to be true to who you are and your values, but you also have to evolve with the times. I've told our staff, you can adapt or die. And none of us wants to die."

How then do coaches strike the right balance? The answer, according to coaches who spoke with ESPN, is having an inner circle empowered to question the status quo.

Former North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams said he had a contingent of fellow coaches he respected -- John Thompson, Bobby Knight, Jerry Tarkanian, Dean Smith -- that he often used as a sounding board. Doeren said former ECU coach Ruffin McNeill serves a similar role on his staff. Swinney, for his part, has often leaned on his chief of football administration, Woody McCorvey, as his voice of reason.

"You rely on your staff," Alabama coach Nick Saban said. "It's how you try to psychologically prepare your guys to play to the standard that they need to play to, to create value for themselves and for our team. That's a full-time job."

In 2014, Saban sensed Alabama was falling behind the times offensively and wanted to change his approach. He hired Lane Kiffin to install an up-tempo philosophy that upended the Tide's DNA from its past championship teams. It was often a fraught relationship, but as Georgia Tech coach and former Alabama assistant Brent Key said, Saban understood both the importance of change and the challenge of actually implementing it. He hired the outspoken Kiffin, Key surmised, because Kiffin was perhaps the only coach in the country who could truly challenge Saban without ultimately caving under the weight of the head coach's past success.

"Yes-men are good for your ego but not for production," Doeren said. "You have to have people that will constructively keep your mind going in the right direction and challenge your thought pattern. I think that leads to growth."

And yet, former Syracuse basketball coach Jim Boeheim said, there's a risk in adapting with each new change within the game, too. Sometimes the safest path through a storm is to maintain course.

"They told me that 10 years ago about the [3-2] zone, and then we went to the Sweet 16 and the Final Four," Boeheim said of his famed defensive scheme. "They'll always come up with something."

Clemson defensive end Xavier Thomas, who has spent six years playing for Swinney, said his coach's consistency -- including his steadfast investment in his own players -- is Swinney's biggest strength.

"He's big on his values and his standard," Thomas said. "You don't see that much in today's world -- people saying the same things they really value."

What Thomas is used to seeing, however, is the version of Swinney introduced to the outside world by Tyler from Spartanburg.

For players, a heated Swinney expressing some PG-13 language is a normal day at the office. For outsiders used to the aw-shucks Swinney he usually portrays on camera, it was a revelation.

"We get that side of coach all the time in meetings," Thomas said. "It was good to release that out into the world and bring some people down to earth."

And yet, few members of the Clemson inner circle think Swinney's clearing the air on his radio show had anything to do with the Tigers' run of four straight wins to end the season. That inspiration came a day earlier, away from public scrutiny, when Swinney challenged his team to prove it deserved to win games.

Truth is, there's rarely much upside to a public scorched-earth campaign. It's a waste of time, Boeheim said, though he doesn't exactly regret a few of his all-timers. It's a distraction, agreed Saban. Williams noted those monologues are unlikely to change anyone's mind.

And yet, sometimes the pressure builds enough that it simply needs to find a release.

"The guy got to him a little bit," Spurrier said. "But Dabo can talk for a while when you ask him a question, and he was probably ready to get that off his chest."

Williams remembers driving through rural Georgia on a recruiting trip years ago when he came upon a radio call-in show for former Bulldogs basketball coach Hugh Durham. A fan had dialed in and ranted about Durham's recent failures, and eventually, the coach heard enough. Durham unleashed -- something to the effect of the guy likely being a plumber with an exposed posterior unqualified to critique a basketball coach, with a handful of expletives thrown in for good measure -- and "I about ran off the road laughing," Williams said.

A few months later, Williams ended up playing golf with Durham, and he gleefully recalled the story as the two marched down a fairway.

"Boy, I'd just had enough," Durham said. "Sometimes, you've just got to tell them what you think."