USC fans five-bombing an unsuspecting Dabo? Disrespectful or funny? You be the judge
Clemson players have different opinions about the five-bomb photos that were posted on social media by South Carolina fans after the Gamecocks earned five consecutive wins over Clemson from 2009-13.
Tigers coach Dabo Swinney would be out in public, either on a recruiting trip, at a restaurant or another public place, when a USC fan would ask for a picture with the Clemson head coach.
Swinney would oblige, but as he posed for the picture the USC fan would hold up five fingers, symbolizing the five consecutive wins, then post the photo to social media. Swinney became aware of it after several months.
“I take pictures with people all the time, just different people. I don’t do social media. I don’t have facebook or none of that stuff. I guess people take pictures and they put it all over the world,” Swinney said. “I would have random people show me something, and I’d be like, ‘Well son of a gun.’ I was just taking a picture with somebody at a McDonald’s or something. I’d have no idea.”
Swinney used the pictures as motivation before last year’s 56-7 drubbing of South Carolina, showing them to players during a team meeting during the week leading up to the game.
Still, Swinney said he does not hold any kind of grudge.
“That’s just part of the rivalry. It’s a rivalry. Those people don’t know me. They don’t like me because I work at Clemson, but I don’t take that personal,” he said. “They don’t know me. They just know I’m the coach (at Clemson), so if I’m the coach I’m the bad guy. Pull against him. That’s how it goes in this state.”
While Swinney does not have a huge problem with the photos, some of his players do. Tigers linebacker Kendall Joseph in particular said he was bothered by the pictures.
“It wasn’t too funny, to be honest. It was disrespectful,” Joseph said. “You’ve got a head coach that’s taking time out of his day to take pictures with fans and disrespecting him like that -- I highly doubt Clemson fans would do the same thing to the coach over there. So I didn’t think it was too funny.”
Clemson defensive end Clelin Ferrell has a different opinion. The redshirt sophomore said the first thing he thinks of when someone mentions Gamecocks is the photos.
“I was dying laughing. I ain’t going to lie to you. It was hilarious because he was smiling so extra hard and then he don’t even know. The kid was like, ‘Yea we beat you like five times…’ A lot of us were in there laughing because that was really funny, but then when you see he found out and somebody told him what that meant he was so mad… It’s all laughs now,” Ferrell said. “It’s nothing that we really think about and stuff like that. It was just something like, ‘OK, well hopefully that’s a little bit of motivation for y’all to go out there and put on a good show last year.’”
This story was originally published November 22, 2017 at 2:14 PM.