Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney is not having a very good October.
After his Tigers fell to North Carolina State on Saturday, Clemson is now 0-2 after Swinney questioned if the team losing games would “lighten up the bandwagon.”
At 4-4, this is the worst season Swinney has had in quite some time as Clemson’s head coach.
Now, he’s recorded as chewing out a critical Clemson fan who called into Swinney’s weekly radio show Tiger Calls on Monday night.
The whole drama started after “Tyler from Spartanburg” called in to the show to question why Swinney was making so much money while the team was underperforming (among other gripes about the coach and program).
After the question, Swinney absolutely blew up on “Tyler from Spartanburg” with a lengthy, angry rebuttal. You can hear a bit of how that went below, and you can hear Swinney’s full rant on the Tiger Calls website.
Dabo Swinney went scorched earth on Tyler from Spartanburg during his radio call-in show on Monday.
Here’s the question from Tyler and answer from Swinney via (@CFBKings)pic.twitter.com/oaqpbUipCp
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) October 31, 2023
Swinney started by blaming fans like “Tyler from Spartanburg” for allegedly creating unrealistic expectations for the program without appreciating the team’s recent run of successes.
He also told Tyler that he could apply for the Clemson job if he wanted and said fans like this “love to destroy people with [their] comments.”
The height of the rant came when Swinney called the agitated caller a “[expletive] kid” and said he’d quit if the school wasn’t happy with his coaching performance.
“I ain’t gonna let some [expletive] kid get on this phone and create this stuff,” Swinney fired back at the radio caller. “If you’ve got a problem with that, I don’t care, alright? I work for the Board of Trustees, the president and the AD, and if they’re tired of me leading this program, all they’ve got to do is let me know. I’ll go somewhere else where this an appreciation.”
Yikes, folks. Swinney seems very done with how this season is going, and it feels more possible than ever that Clemson could actually have a new coach next season.
The venom in how Swinney says “Tyler” during the rant is enough to glean that; he literally tells the caller he’s not going to be talked to “like he’s 12 years old.” The Tigers coach sounds like he’s absolutely had it with some of the Clemson fan base.
At the very least, “Tyler from Spartanburg” probably won’t be calling into Tiger Calls anytime soon. In Swinney’s words, “you don’t ever have to call back.”
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