Is this Clemson's death rattle? Or is Dabo Swinney still capable of righting the ship? - ESPN

BETWEEN THE TIME Dabo Swinney was fired as an assistant at Alabama and when he landed his next job at Clemson, he worked in commercial real estate — a salesman carving a niche in the business world, where he learned a thing or two about sustaining success that he later weaved into his philosophy on program building.

For most businesses, Swinney said in 2015, just as Clemson was shoving its way into the upper echelons of college football, their growth chart follows a similar bell curve: the birth, the growth, the plateau, the decline and the death.

«But the great businesses out there, those great programs, they don't plateau,» Swinney said. «So how do you do that? You have to constantly reinvent, reinvest, reset, learn, grow. You change. You have to do that.… I think every successful business, every consistent program, that's a mentality. You can't be satisfied. Because just as soon as you think you've arrived and you're satisfied, then you plateau and then the next thing you know you're on that decline.»

From 2015 through 2020, Clemson made the four-team College Football Playoff every year, including four trips to the national championship game (with two wins).

The growth phase was one of the most dynamic in college football history.

From 2021 through 2024, as Swinney so frequently pointed out this offseason amid swirling criticism of the program's regression, Clemson was still quite good — 40 wins, two ACC titles, the 10th-best record in college football. But the wins were closer, the losses more frequent, and without Deshaun Watson or Trevor Lawrence at quarterback, the cracks had started to show. Then his longtime assistants, offensive coordinator Tony Elliott and defensive coordinator Brent Venables, left for head