Clemson and Alabama face off regularly head-to-head for top recruits and national championships. With the addition of new “intern” Terry Bowden, Dabo Swinney appears to have found another area to compete with Alabama.

We’ve seen fired college football head coaches such as Lane Kiffin, Mike Locksley and Steve Sarkisian all bounce back to land new gigs after joining Saban’s Alabama staff. Former Clemson coach Tommy Bowden thinks Clemson could become a new spot for a fired coach, like Terry Bowden, looking to “re-surface.”

“You couldn’t ask for a better place to kind of re-surface and re-structure yourself,” Tommy Bowden recently said on WNSP-FM, via AL.com. “Right now, Clemson and Alabama would be in the top two programs if a coach wanted to go to re-market or re-make himself or learn from the ground up.”

“He couldn’t be at a better place than Clemson,” Tommy Bowden added. “I never had the ambition to stay in it that long. He does. If you have that ambition to stay in that long, why not do it at the hottest place right now with the hottest programs with the hottest coach?”

Terry Bowden, 63, will be taking an online graduate school course and work with Swinney’s staff as an unpaid graduate intern. It will be interesting to see if more fired coaches choose to work as interns or analysts for Swinney in hopes of landing a new gig elsewhere. Terry Bowden coached Auburn 1993-98 and was most recently fired from Akron, which is paying him through February 2021. He joined Clemson as a graduate intern earlier this month.