Spill Your Own Guts (2015)

Dabo Swinney, Clemson, and the fine line between adaptation and anachronism.

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Subjectivity Over Fact (1969)

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I.

It’s been nearly a decade now since a man named Dabo stood in the rain and spoke breathlessly of the good lord, very large men and a la carte entrails:

This remains one of the most nonsensically glorious postgame moments in the recent history of college football. I am still perplexed as to how one wouldn’t Bring Their Own Guts to a football game without it turning into an Eli Roth film. Can you pick up a set of guts at the Viscera Superstore on University? Is it true that Jack Lambert played a full game at linebacker after forgetting to pack his large intestine on a trip to Cincinnati? And while we’re on the subject, what would happen if you fielded a defense entirely made up of zombies? Would they be especially ferocious against the read option, or would they merely get distracted and begin to consume each other’s gall bladders?

Bring Your Own Guts was a very weird phrase to popularize, but then, William Christopher “Dabo” Swinney has always been a little strange. And for a long time, this was not a bad thing. His weirdness, like many a coach who came before him, was his calling card. It was a way for him to garner attention on the national stage for a Clemson football program that had fallen short in big games. It was a way for him to attract attention, and to draw in recruits, and eventually, it won him a pair of national championships at Clemson—which, in the age of the SEC’s encroaching dominance, felt like a minor miracle.

Swinney has never seemed to care much how his own eclectic convictions might affect his public image. He has (metaphorically) worn his own guts on his sleeve, inspired in large part by his own difficult coming of age story, a family tale marked by crippling poverty and chronic alcoholism. For several years, when Steve Spurrier was the coach at South Carolina, Swinney was willing to serve as the butt of Spurrier’s jokes, as long as he got the last laugh. When his program gained a reputation for its overt Christianity (at a public university), Swinney honestly didn’t seem to get what the problem was. He is relentlessly earnest, which is more than can be said for a lot of other football coaches, but now, in a sport that’s more focused than ever on zero-sum results, Swinney’s earnestness has arguably become his biggest weakness.

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II.

You don’t have to like all that’s happened to college football in age of player empowerment. (I would argue that most of us don’t, even if we agree with the underlying principles of fairness that enabled it to occur.) But Swinney has gone full-on ostrich in this moment, by largely refusing to recruit transfer students and by using his name, image and likeness collective largely to retain the athletes he already has, rather than to expand his reach.

Swinney makes a strong argument as to the why: He wants to focus on the players he recruits and develops himself, and to see them through to graduation. He doesn’t want to become what he calls a “catch-and-release place.” And this is a noble way of thinking. It is an honorable way of thinking. But it is also quite clearly anachronistic, and if that was not already clear, it became clearer when Georgia beat Clemson 34-3 last weekend, in a game that was not nearly that close.

Fittingly enough, Swinney has actually Brought His Own Guts to this moment. It actually takes quite a bit of chutzpah to refuse to get caught up in the furor of the moment. The problem, of course, is that this college football has always been a cutthroat industry, and the dudes who crawl under Swinney’s skin on talk-radio shows don’t give a rodent’s colon about principled stands or about honoring the trajectory of student-athletes over the course of four seasons. To them, there is only the here and now; to them, a coach that’s won two national championships is no longer a coach worth keeping if he’s regressed to winning only nine or 10 games per season.

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III.

“I want to win,” Swinney said back in 2015, in explaining why, during a blowout victory against Miami, he kept his team on the field and lectured them about respecting the opposing team regardless of the circumstances. “I want to kill the opponent. But I want to do it the right way.”

What Swinney doesn’t seem to recognize is that right and wrong, in the context of his own sport, were always fluid concepts. For a long time, college sports clung to a moral and ethical code that often disregarded the athletes at the center of its story—a system that allowed coaches full control—and this was considered “right.” Now things have swung in a more egalitarian direction—maybe even a little too far, one might argue—and Swinney seems to be struggling to function in a system that’s utterly different from the one he grew up with. He’s still clinging to that need for control.

In a way, it’s completely understandable: Swinney transcended his own difficult childhood and made his name by taking control of his circumstances, and I think he imagines he’ll ensure his program’s longevity by taking control of these circumstances, as well. Personally, I’d kind of like it to work, if only to slow down what feels like a runaway money train in college football. But at what point does a principled stand regress into a stubborn failure to adapt? At what point do you have to find an acceptable path toward a compromise?

I wonder if we witnessed that point last weekend, in that ugly loss to Georgia. But maybe it’s too late. Maybe Swinney’s program is now nothing more than a zombie, full of guts but entirely devoid of common sense as it stumbles aimlessly in search of what it once was.

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