Dabo Swinney remains very confident in his ability to turn the Clemson football program around.
To say that the 2025 college football season was a disappointment for the Clemson Tigers would be a massive understatement. It was a nightmare scenario for the program.
After beginning the season as one of the top championship contenders in the nation, the team completely fell apart. Clemson lost in the season opener at home against the LSU Tigers and the season never turned around from that point moving forward.
After beating Troy in Week 2, the Tigers lost to both Georgia Tech and Syracuse. Wins over North Carolina and Boston College got them back on track for a moment, but the season fell apart from there.
In the next two games, Clemson lost to both SMU and Duke. The team finished out the year with four straight wins, but finishing the season with a 7-5 overall record was not what Swinney and company had in mind.
Following the end of the regular season, Swinney was asked about the future of Tigers' football. He delivered strong comments about where he believes the program is heading.
“I’m incredibly bullish,” he said. “I mean, we are gonna achieve great things, we’re gonna win more championships. Why I can say that is because we’ve done it over and over and over again.”
He also made sure to remind everyone that Clemson has not been a bad football program just because it hasn't been able to win a championship in recent years.
“I mean, we’ve been to seven playoffs in ten years. All of a sudden, we think it’s just easy to do. It’s not, it’s not easy to do. There’s only 12 teams, but we’ll win another national championship. We’ll win more conference championships. We’ll win more big games.”
Even though the record this season wasn't great, Swinney doesn't believe that the record truly indicates that the Tigers were a bad football team this year.
“Every 7–5 ain’t the same,” he said. “We’re about three plays away from this being a different story and a different press conference right now. But that’s football, that’s our reality.”
Granted, there is good reason to be disappointed in what Clemson did this season. No one should be satisfied with the kind of year the team put together.
However, it's important to get get too low with the lows. Swinney is still one of the best head coaches in college football and he remains extremely confident that the Tigers will get back to winning at a very high level.
Fans can only hope that next season is the year that happens.