Clemson knocked off Syracuse 47-21 on Saturday, a final score that (for those who didn’t watch the game) suggests a total beatdown by the Tigers.
It wasn’t quite that, however. Clemson got out to a decent start, but then let Syracuse climb back into the game due to some costly errors. The Tigers were only leading by six points with two minutes remaining in the third quarter. The Tigers then ran off 21 straight points over the final 17 minutes of the game, and cruised to a victory.
After the game, Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney was asked about his team’s energy level early. Instead of reflecting that they made some mistakes in the second quarter and rebounded nicely, like you would expect a well-paid coach to do, Swinney decided to get extremely defensive and annoyed, for some reason.
Even weirder — the question itself was set up by something Swinney’s own quarterback, Trevor Lawrence, had said to reporters before Swinney spoke to them.
Lawrence had said the team’s energy level was lacking, so the reporters asked Swinney about it. And Swinney reacted by getting all mad.
First, Swinney’s comments, via ESPN:
“I just want to make sure I’m at the right press conference here. We did win the game, I think. Am I in the right spot? You don’t usually score 47 points if you don’t have the right energy. We made some mistakes. It’s not energy when you don’t make a certain play, or snap the ball over a head. Just didn’t execute, but at the end of the day, it’s not easy to win.
“There’s a lot of teams out there that would have lost this game with some of the mistakes that we made. We won the game by almost four touchdowns.”
First off: Calm down, Coach. It’s a question about energy levels. They aren’t saying your team stinks.
But that wasn’t the end of the quote. Here’s where things get weird:
“I’m not getting any questions about ‘Proud of you guys for winning the game.’ It’s a lot of negative questions. You’re not going to get any negative stuff from me.”
I’m going to pray that Swinney was saying that reporters should be asking HIM if he was proud of the guys for winning the game.
Because the way it came off, it sure sounded like Swinney was saying that reporters themselves should be saying they’re proud of Clemson for winning. Which, buddy, that isn’t how this all works.
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