Misery Index: Dabo Swinney and Clemson aren’t having much fun this season

In future years, Clemson being ranked No. 4 in the preseason Associated Press poll is going to look like one of those strange cultural artifacts that don’t make much sense in retrospect, akin to the popularity of waterbeds, stuffed celery being considered elite cocktail party food and drawings of apes trading on the Internet for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But worse than the ranking — which never made sense in the first place — was the narrative surrounding Dabo Swinney’s 17th season as head coach.

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It wasn’t just that people thought Clemson was going to be a national championship contender again after four pretty mediocre years by Clemson standards, it was this notion that Swinney’s continuity-based approach to team building was going to be rewarded in ways it hadn’t been since the start of college football’s transfer portal era.

Here’s the funny part about that: As Clemson sits at 1-2, looking like the most disappointing team in the country, its best player has been Purdue transfer Will Heldt.

Even Heldt’s All-American-level play as an edge rusher wasn’t enough to save the Tigers from a 24-21 loss at Georgia Tech, a highly entertaining game that ended with a 55-yard field goal by Aidan Birr as time expired.

But the issue for Swinney isn’t about one tough loss, or even the Tigers’ season opener against LSU when their offense couldn’t do much of anything against a talented defense. It’s the pile-up of losses like this against quality opponents that have completely undermined the credibility of his program.

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Sure, there’s a scenario where Clemson gets its act together, rolls off wins against the likes of Duke and Boston College, beats Florida State at home and ends up cosmetically back in the College Football Playoff mix by the time it faces South Carolina on Thanksgiving weekend. We’ve seen that act before.

In fact, we’ve seen it enough that the only appropriate response would be to roll our eyes.

Nobody’s going to buy it.

“I’ve had enough praise and criticism to last three lifetimes,” Swinney told reporters after the game. “I’ll be fine. But I hurt for our team and our fans. These are great kids. They care. It’s not the start we wanted, but we’ve got to find a way forward.”

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Here’s the way forward: It’s time for the conversation around Clemson to change dramatically. And if we assume Swinney is going to continue in his job making more than $11 million per year — because why wouldn’t he? — small tweaks in staff and philosophy aren’t going to cut it anymore.

When you win two national titles, get all the resources necessary to compete in perpetuity and play in an ACC where you only face a couple truly big games per year, this isn’t just good enough.

Real leadership in college football is never stubborn and doesn’t allow itself to get deluded about the true state of affairs.

Clemson isn’t a contender anymore, and it’s not a top-10 program in the country. Before Swinney had his first real taste of success, he would have acknowledged that reality and done whatever it took to drag his program to the mountaintop.

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But is this new version — a little older, a whole lot richer and way more stubborn about how he does things — going to be up for a full program reinvention?

Whether Swinney truly sees what’s necessary is still up for debate, which is why Clemson reigns as America’s most miserable fan base in Week 3.

Big Ten: To the extent UCLA football fans exist (and you wouldn’t really know it judging by the crowds that show up at the Rose Bowl these days), they must be asking what the point is of all this. And by this, we mean playing Big Ten football when you can’t even beat teams in the Mountain West. Friday night’s 35-10 loss to New Mexico not only showed that the 30-23 loss to UNLV one week earlier wasn’t a fluke, it pointed to a grim possibility that this team might go 0-12. Maybe the Bruins can find a win against Northwestern or Maryland, but UCLA doesn’t seem serious enough about football at this point to make the inconvenience of playing in the Big Ten worth it. That’s how it ended up hiring DeShaun Foster on the cheap in the first place after Chip Kelly’s departure. Sure, it’ll only cost a little more than $5 million to buy him out, but the institutional issues seem deeper than coaching.

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Big 12: A year ago, Florida State was ranked No. 10 to start the season, lost a heartbreaking season opener in Ireland, came back stateside and spiraled to a 2-10 record that nobody saw coming. Well, it appears we have a new archetype for the Dublin Curse with Kansas State. The Wildcats went to Ireland ranked No. 17, lost a nailbiter to Iowa State and have been stunningly bad ever since. Actually, it’s worse than that. Kansas State isn’t just 1-3 (and the win required a very fortunate comeback against North Dakota), it looked like a team that was disinterested in a 23-17 loss at Arizona. Coach Chris Klieman promised changes after the game, but Kansas State is so bad along the offensive line that you wonder whether they have the mental and emotional stamina to fight for a season that’s already gone. That’s what happened to FSU last year, and we shouldn’t be surprised if Kansas State struggles to stop the freefall.

SEC: How would Tennessee’s fan base spend their time if not for the what-ifs they’ve lived through over the years? So here’s another one for the ages. If Josh Heupel just sends Max Gilbert out to kick from 38 yards rather than snapping it one more time to center the ball, does Tennessee beat Georgia with a walk-off field goal? The answer is probably yes. Instead, the Vols committed a false start penalty. That backed the kick up five yards, Gilbert missed, and the game went to overtime where Georgia escaped Knoxville with a 44-41 victory. Sure, it’s a choke job. But ultimately, both teams are still very much in contention for the CFP and the Vols are good enough to get there if they play as well as they did Saturday. But that’s a tough way to lose to Georgia for the ninth straight year.

Group of Five: Washington State went 8-5 last season, but the head coach from that team is now at Wake Forest, the offensive coordinator and quarterback are at Oklahoma, and the defensive coordinator is with the Denver Broncos. The result? At least this week, it was a 59-10 loss to North Texas. That’s an awful tough blow — especially when you consider that North Texas’ head coach, Eric Morris, was the Cougars’ offensive coordinator in 2022 with quarterback Cam Ward, who left for Miami and became the NFL’s No. 1 overall draft pick this year. Most of those losses happened because the Pac-12 fell apart and left Washington State without a stable home, and you wonder if they’ll have that much brainpower coming through the doors ever again.

Headset Misery

Luke Fickell: Maybe he should change his name to Luck Fickell, because if it wasn’t for two-star recruit Desmond Ridder defying all odds to become a great quarterback at Cincinnati, Wisconsin’s coach wouldn’t be in position to collect a $25 million buyout after this season. Yes, Fickell was a hot name in 2022 after taking the Bearcats to the CFP one year prior — an astounding accomplishment for which he deserves a lot of credit. But his 14-14 record at Wisconsin, which doesn’t include a single notable win, should get a lot more scrutiny after an uncompetitive 38-14 win at Alabama.

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Brent Pry: Nobody in the history of college football has been more fired before actually being fired than Pry. It’s an all-systems failure at Virginia Tech, which trailed 31-0 at home to Old Dominion before losing 45-26. What else can you say? Pry, who rode shotgun with James Franklin at Vanderbilt and Penn State, will almost certainly end his tenure with three losing records in four seasons at Virginia Tech. That’s a tough look at a place that strung together 25 consecutive winning seasons until 2018. Virginia Tech is a more difficult job now than it was back then, but there have to be consequences for a tenure this embarrassing.

Jamey Chadwell: Liberty pays Chadwell like a power conference coach, with a contract reportedly worth more than $4 million per year. But they’re not getting power conference results lately. In fact, if you go back to the end of last season, Liberty has lost four of its last five games to the likes of Sam Houston, Buffalo, Jacksonville State and most recently Bowling Green. None of those programs come close to Liberty in financial resources, and yet Chadwell has lost to all of them. Chadwell has had a lot of good seasons as a head coach, which is why the Flames paid so much to lure him from Coastal Carolina. But the trajectory at Liberty has to be concerning.

Kirby Smart: Sure, Georgia made plays when it had to make them and got a huge road win in Knoxville. But Smart must be tempted to start tearing hairs straight out of his scalp after watching that defense give up 496 yards to Tennessee. When Georgia was at its zenith in 2021 and 2022, it looked like a facsimile of peak Alabama because Smart’s defense was so deep, talented and vicious. But the physicality and fundamentals have deteriorated precipitously, and Georgia barely seems like Georgia anymore on that side of the ball. Maybe that’s just the way it is in the NIL era now that Smart can’t horde talent the way he used to.

Steve Sarkisian: When reporters asked earlier in the week whether quarterback Arch Manning had a shoulder injury — a reasonable question based on how he grimaced while throwing the ball last week against San Jose State — Sark responded with snark. “I’ve never filmed any of you guys when you’re using the bathroom, so I don’t know what faces you make when you’re doing that,” he said. Though we’re still confused what point he was trying to make, this is a tough situation. If Manning is injured, Texas shouldn’t be playing him because he’s not performing well at all. But if he’s not injured and playing this way, that’s probably even worse. After Texas muddled through an unimpressive 27-10 win over UTEP, we can no longer pretend like everything is hunky-dory in Austin.

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Moments of Misery

Brian Kelly got wiped out: At 63 years old, give him some credit for taking a blindside hit from his own offensive tackle Weston Davis on the sideline and bouncing back to coach the rest of the game. Kelly was running toward an official to call a timeout during LSU’s 20-10 win over Florida when Davis’ wrestling match with a Gators player spilled over to the boundary and ended up bulldozing an unsuspecting Kelly into the bench. Kelly is lucky he didn’t get hurt too badly, but he’s going to need an ice bath on Sunday.

Deion Sanders made a dumb excuse: After Colorado lost to Houston 36-20 on Friday night, he suggested in his press conference that there might be a correlation between struggling in night games and the fact that his team practices normally at 8 a.m. Beyond the irony of Coach Prime’s team being bad in prime time, the obvious fix would be to move practice to later in the day if you truly believe morning practices cause bad night performances. More likely, Sanders is just struggling to spin the fact that Colorado doesn’t have much talent now that his son is no longer the quarterback and he doesn’t have a Heisman Trophy winner on the roster.

LaNorris Sellers took an unlucky injury: Late in the first half of South Carolina’s 31-7 loss to Vanderbilt, the Gamecocks’ quarterback took a hit from Langston Patterson that didn’t look bad to the naked eye but was ruled as targeting because of some helmet-to-helmet contact. Sellers left the game with an undisclosed injury, and that was basically the death knell for South Carolina’s offense. The Gamecocks had just 97 yards in the second half before garbage time kicked in over the final few minutes. That’s a tough way to go down when it’s hard to even see how your quarterback got hurt.

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Arkansas blew an incredible opportunity: When the Razorbacks got the ball back with just under four minutes remaining at Ole Miss, it had all the makings of an upset. Arkansas was moving the ball almost at will and had the Rebels on their heels, needing a touchdown for a massive win in Oxford. Instead, coming out of the two-minute warning, Arkansas threw swing pass to Jalen Brown who was fighting for first down yardage near the 23-yard line but fumbled it in a crowd for their only turnover of the game. Ole Miss was able to kill the rest of the clock with one first down and held on for a 41-35 victory.

Alcorn State got mercy ruled: At halftime of Mississippi State’s 63-0 win over Alcorn State, the school sent an announcement that the head coaches had agreed to shorten the game to 10-minute quarters in the second half. If you didn’t know that was allowed by rule, don’t worry. It almost never happens. But it also illustrates why SEC schools should be playing opponents their own size rather than schools like Alcorn State.