CLEMSON — It does not matter who you are or what you have accomplished in the past, when your team does not reach its expectations or, even worse, has a historically bad season, things must be changed.
The Clemson Insider has spent several weeks gathering information since the Tigers’ season, which started out with a No. 4 preseason ranking, spiraled out of control.
Here is some of what we have uncovered to this point:
We can tell you, through multiple sources, that there is tension in the football complex and major changes are coming to the football staff. Some of these changes may surprise some of you.
If you recall, Swinney pointed out in his post-game press conference that athletic director Graham Neff was in the room, which we can say is very unusual. TCI learned there is some tension between Swinney and the administration at Clemson.
Understand, Swinney is a very proud person, and we are hearing that the administration is pushing him to make some serious changes to his program and Clemson’s head coach is not too happy that others are telling him how to run his program after what he has done for the University.
If this sounds familiar to you, it should. These were some of the similar problems former Clemson baseball coach Jack Leggett had the year before he was fired following the 2015 season. Remember, Leggett did a lot of great things during his 22 years at Clemson. He won more than 900 games, took Clemson to six College World Series appearances and was inducted into the College Baseball Hall of Fame. As TCI has documented a number of times, it is how the baseball program fell off when recruiting became a financial issue and we are seeing a similar drop off in football since the NIL started in 2021.
We are not saying Swinney is going to be fired, and we are confident that will not happen this year, we can just tell you there are parallels and Leggett and Swinney are more alike than you might think. Like Leggett, we are told Swinney is feeling disrespected, as well.
Right now, if Swinney leaves Clemson, we can tell you, that is going to be a Dabo Swinney decision.
We have been told some other things, but we are working our sources to confirm some of those items, and we will pass those along at the appropriate time.