A Call to Action for Clemson Fans: Be Patient

In an increasingly cutthroat college football world, head coaches find themselves with ever-declining job security.  One need only briefly scan the college landscape to find worthy head coaches pushed to the brink of losing their jobs.

Bobby Bowden, for example, is the most recent and perhaps most high profile head coach to find himself in hot water.  Such is the nature of the business of college football and college sports in general in recent times.  

I question the logic of fanaticism that can turn against a coach like Bobby Bowden, who won two national championships and put Florida State football on the map.

Clemson’s new head coach, Dabo Swinney, has found himself in a similar bit of a tight spot.  After all, the start to his first full season as head coach has been less than illustrious: Clemson currently holds a losing record and lost just last Saturday to a punching bag Maryland team.

While it’s completely unfair to compare Bobby Bowden, a veteran coach of over 30 years, to Dabo Swinney, a relatively young first year head coach, the sentiments against the two are related.  The call for Bobby Bowden’s job and that of Dabo Swinney’s are equally irrational.

Clemson fans want to win NOW, which is understandable.  Frankly, who doesn’t? However, winning can’t come overnight.  Even a great new head coach needs a season or two under his belt before anything extraordinary happens.

It took John Wooden 16 seasons to win his first National Championship at UCLA.  If the fan base had gotten impatient and fired Wooden during a five year postseason drought, UCLA would have missed out on ten NCAA National Championships!

Clemson fans need not look all the way to UCLA basketball in the 1960s for an example of patience being a good idea though.  We have a perfectly good example in our own sports history.

In 1980, just his second year as head coach, Danny Ford went a disappointing 6-5 in a season where the team was expected to be bowl-bound.  It is often believed that Ford saved his job when he won the final game of the season in a rout of ranked rival South Carolina.

Had cooler heads not prevailed, Danny Ford may well have been fired, and Clemson never would have run the table in 1981 on the way to winning the school’s only National Title.

The moral of the story is patience.  Swinney hasn’t blown anyone away just yet, but be patient Clemson fans.  Give Dabo a couple of seasons to get his footing before calling for his head.  If Swinney never gets a real shot, we may never know what could have been.