Dabo Swinney and Clemson told you to buy stock low. Now they are out to prove it was a shrewd investment
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Is it little ol’ Clemson back?
If they are, don’t say Dabo Swinney didn’t warn you.
He was out there all along, telling you that if Clemson was a stock, you needed to “buy all you can freaking buy right now” in November 2023. I’d understand if you didn’t empty your wallet back then, given the Tigers were 5-4 at the time, grinding their way through the toughest year in Tigertown since a 6-7 campaign in 2010, Swinney’s second full season in charge.
Swinney offered the sage stock tip again in 2024, though, as Clemson lingered just outside the top 20 and Playoff picture most of the year before clipping SMU in the ACC Championship Game to win Swinney his 9th ACC title and send Clemson back to the College Football Playoff for the first time since 2020.
In other words, you were told to invest.
You were told not to bail on a stock that’s delivered 14 consecutive seasons of 9 wins or more.
You were told not to abandon a program that’s advanced to the College Football Playoff 7 times since 2015, winning 2 national championships and playing for 2 others in that time span.
You were told that Tyler in Spartanburg and the folks like him who felt Clemson was no longer perched among the national elite simply because they managed 40 wins and 2 ACC championships in the past 4 seasons — preposterous levels of success for about 98% of the other programs in America — were part of the problem.
I hope some of you listened. Wealth may be just around the corner.
Clemson enters the 2025 college football season as one of the Vegas frontrunners to win the national championship, sitting anywhere from 9-1 to 12-1 in futures betting, easily among the top 5 betting favorites in the country.
Swinney, who is only 55, has a loaded football team that returns 17 starters from last season’s ACC champion. The Tigers were the overwhelming choice to win the ACC again, garnering 167 of the 183 available media votes at ACC Media Day in Charlotte last month.
But this year’s Clemson team is focused on a much grander prize: a third national championship in the last 10 years for the program everyone loves to doubt.
Did you buy all the stock you can freaking buy?
Admittedly, I didn’t.
Perhaps I should have, since Clemson is my 2025 national championship pick.
Sure, there were reasons to wonder if Swinney had lost his fastball.
It wasn’t just the record. In truth, it was hardly the record.
At most programs, 40 wins over 4 seasons, with 2 conference championships and a College Football Playoff appearance, would be cause for celebration, not alarm.
It was the notion that Swinney was too old school, too antiquated in his commitment to the “Clemson family” to understand modern program building.
In an era when championship programs consistently use transfers to build title contenders (each of the past 5 national champions featured at least 5 starters from the transfer portal), Swinney declined until recently to even dip his toes into the portal’s roster-healing waters. Swinney and his staff remain one of the best recruiting and evaluating programs in America, but in this age, high school recruiting alone is essential but insufficient.
There are signs, at least, that Swinney understands that, even if he won’t truly change his stripes — stripes that, keep in mind, have made Clemson one of the winningest college football programs this century.
Will Heidt was brought in from Purdue to boost the pass rush and depth on an underachieving defensive line. Tristan Smith arrives with 6-5 length and a big-time FCS receiving profile to add red-zone options for an offense that seemed to find its big play footing in the ACC Championship Game and hard-fought College Football Playoff defeat to Texas. Jeremiah Alexander arrives from Alabama to help ease the loss of Barrett Carter to the NFL at linebacker. When you recruit as well as Clemson, the portal doesn’t need to be plug and play. Instead, it can be a tool for strategic depth building. Swinney’s willingness to understand and adapt, whether long overdue or not, will make this incarnation of Clemson better.
The Tigers also have an immense talent at the most important position in sports in Cade Klubnik who, after taking his lumps and earning his battle scars, is finally blossoming into an elite leader and performer on the football field.
Klubnik is as “Clemson” a story as you get in the sport of college football these days.
A 5-star recruit and the No. 1 quarterback out of high school, Klubnik’s lost quarterback competitions, football games, and frustrated fans throughout his time at Clemson. Many players facing the fishbowl Klubnik’s stared down in 4 seasons on the banks of Lake Hartwell would have left long ago. Klubnik stayed, buying into Swinney’s concept of football as a family, a group that sticks together, grows together, loses together, and wins together.
Klubnik now is a legitimate Heisman Trophy candidate, playing with a loaded wide receiver corps, improved offensive line depth, and a confidence and swagger that was missing too often from his first 2-plus seasons on campus. Longtime run game stalwart Phil Mafah has gone to the NFL and Jay Haynes is still recovering from an ACL injury, but between Adam Randall, Gideon Davidson, and David Eziomume, it isn’t as if that room lacks talent.
Clemson’s title hopes and the merits of my national title prediction will depend on how much more new defensive coordinator Tom Allen gets from a run defense that was, put plainly, putrid in 2025 (85th in rushing defense, 90th in rushing defense success rate). Allen coached a top 10 run unit at national semifinalist Penn State a season ago, and before that, his Indiana teams were constantly stout against the run.
The Tigers have incredible talent on the interior of that line, with Peter Woods and DeMonte Capehart legitimate freaks. A season ago, teams ran outside as a result, funneling action away from Woods and towards pass-rushing specialist TJ Parker and Clemson’s edge players. Whether Allen and Clemson have fixed that will be the first thing to watch come August 30, when LSU visits Memorial Stadium in a game that will not only decide who plays in the real Death Valley but tell us a ton about the national championship potential of both teams.
Clear that test on their home field, though, and the Tigers should be off to the races, with only an October 4 trip to Chapel Hill and an October 18 home tilt with SMU likely to push Clemson until it visits South Carolina in a Palmetto Cup that could have Playoff implications come November.
Swinney is still a younger man in coaching circles, and it’s hard to imagine he walks away from the game anytime soon, especially if he’s stuck around through the NIL, portal, and Playoff explosion that has defined the first half of this decade.
But it feels like this year, with a loaded team and favorable schedule, could be an inflection point. If Swinney doesn’t win a third national title this season, will he?
Cynics will say no.
But I wouldn’t doubt Little Ol’ Clemson.
Neil Blackmon covers SEC football and basketball for SaturdayDownSouth.com. An attorney, he is also a member of the Football and Basketball Writers Associations of America. He also coaches basketball.
