The longtime Clemson coach may not want his alma mater anyway, but after the past few seasons, he’s not the slam-dunk top choice he was.
To get this out of the way before anything else, Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney might not want to be Alabama’s next head coach.
The Alabama native played wide receiver for the Crimson Tide from 1990-92, and he spent eight years on their coaching staff. In fact, he’s only ever been a coach at Alabama or Clemson. Swinney clearly has an emotional stake in his job, evidenced by his impassioned rant telling people to buy stock in the Tigers after their upset win over Notre Dame. He’s won two national championships and 170 games in 16 years with his team. He may never want to leave.
But think about where the Alabama conversation was just three or four years ago. Nick Saban, who shockingly retired on Wednesday, was still going strong, but the world knew he couldn’t be in Tuscaloosa forever. And there was only one name on everyone’s mind for the next logical call: Swinney. The Clemson coach had bested Saban twice in three years in the national title game and he’d taken the Tigers to the title game four times in five years. Across a five-season span from 2015-19, his team had four 14-win seasons and a combined 69-5 record. He was a state native, a former Crimson Tide himself. If Saban ever walked away, the world accepted that Swinney would probably need to tell Alabama no before they asked anyone else.
In the past four years, however, the Clemson stock (to borrow Swinney’s phrase) has slowly cooled. Clemson lost multiple games each year, losing twice in 2020, three times in each of the next two seasons, and then four times this past year as the Tigers failed to win 10 games for the first time since 2010.
Despite landing multiple five-star, blue-chip quarterback prospects like D.J. Uiagalelei and Cade Klubnik and luring star offensive coordinator Garrett Riley this past season, the Tigers have finished 82nd, 30th, and 52nd in scoring offense over the past three seasons, and they haven’t finished better than 48th in total offense over that span.
Swinney has also locked horns with some changes to the college football landscape, changes the rest of the country spent that time adapting to. He famously said back in 2015 that he might quit if his players started getting paid, years before name, image, and likeness compensation became one of the foremost recruiting tools. He said his program was built in “God’s name, image, and likeness.” He famously prefers to build up his own recruits rather than seeking the transfer portal, a decision he stuck to even last month while programs like TCU made the playoffs through key contributions from transfers.
All told, when viewing his comments on the direction college football has moved in conjunction with his team’s four-year playoff drought, there’s reason to wonder if he’s the coach built for the modern sport. And sure enough, when ESPN’s Pete Thamel tweeted a list of potential buyout candidates for the Crimson Tide, there were four other names on that list.
Swinney didn’t even get the most traction, with rampant speculation about Lanning and a flight from Oregon to Tuscaloosa.
Again, at the end of the day, Swinney might be happy where he is and he may not want the Alabama job. However, compared to how they felt in 2019, I don’t think Alabama wants him as much as they once did, either.
