No more live callers? Clemson weighing big changes for Dabo Swinney radio show
.jpg "Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney talks on radio row during the ACC Football Kickoff in Charlotte, N.C. Wednesday, July 20, 2022.")
Update, Aug. 26: Clemson has confirmed that Dabo Swinney will no longer take live calls from fans on his radio show starting in 2024. Under the new format, “Tiger Sports Hour with Dabo Swinney,” fans can ask him questions via The Roar’s text line.
Ahead of the 2024 Clemson football season, the school athletic department is weighing a number of changes to coach Dabo Swinney’s popular weekly radio show.
One thing the “Tiger Calls” might drop: live callers.
Although Swinney will still appear on the radio show on Monday nights during the season, Clemson is in the process of finalizing a number of tweaks to the show. The school has not yet made a final decision on whether or not Swinney will take any calls from fans, an athletic department spokesman told The State.
Changes to “Tiger Calls” are being finalized less than a year after tense exchange on the radio show in which a fan who identified himself as “Tyler from Spartanburg” directly challenged Swinney on the state of his program live on air, prompting Clemson’s coach to shoot back with a fiery, six-minute rant that made national news.
But Clemson is not changing the format of the radio show as a direct result of that exchange between Swinney and Tyler from Spartanburg in October 2023, the spokesman said. Rather, whether or not Swinney will take live calls from fans during the 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. hour show is one of many factors still being considered.
“We’re looking at all areas of the show to find ways to make the content engaging and informative on a variety of platforms,” spokesman Jeff Kallin said Wednesday.
Final plans for Tiger Calls are expected to be announced later this month ahead of the show’s debut on Monday, Aug. 26 heading into Clemson’s season opener against Georgia. As per usual, football play-by-play broadcaster Don Munson will host.
Last year, the school overhauled the format of men’s basketball coach Brad Brownell’s weekly radio show and turned it into an hour-long “Tiger Sports Hour” featuring not just Brownell and Munson (who’s hosted the shows for both sports for years) but a rotating cast of current basketball players and support staffers.
That format did not feature any live callers. It included podcast and video components and drew rave reviews from Brownell himself and others within the athletic department for the way it spotlighted people outside of coaches.
Brownell’s radio show (which ran from late November to early March) also served as a successful pilot for what Clemson had been considering for Swinney’s radio show in the future — a new format that could feature “multiple content streams.”
Select portions from Brownell’s show featuring him and Munson talking with players and/or support staffers were available after the fact on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other platforms, and Clemson also uploaded video versions of the show to its in-house streaming service, Clemson+.
All of those changes are under consideration for Swinney’s radio show, which currently airs weekly on 105.5 FM The Roar, the university’s flagship radio station.
A format without callers would likely still include some back-and-forth between Swinney and Munson about Clemson’s previous game as well as the week ahead (common things that fans call in to ask about).
But there could also potentially be radio spots featuring football players and/or staffers talking with Swinney and Munson.
Athletic department officials had already started initially discussing those changes before the infamous Tyler from Spartanburg call, which came after the Tigers started 4-4 last year and featured a fan confronting Swinney on the state of his program.
“I’m curious, why are we paying $11.5 million to go 4-4?” the caller said, directly referencing Swinney’s annual salary (one of the highest nationally) as part of his critique.
As part of nearly six-minute response that made national news on Oct. 30, 2023, Swinney told Tyler fans like him were “part of the problem,” called him a “smart ass kid,” encouraged the caller to apply for Clemson football’s head coaching job himself and emphasized that “there ain’t one thing in my life that I’ve ever failed at.”
“I’m gonna do what I believe is right for the long term of this program … If you got a problem with that, that’s fine,” Swinney said. “But I’m not gonna sit here and let you call. I don’t give a crap how much money I make. You ain’t gonna talk to me like I’m 12 years old. Gotta be freaking kidding me.”
Swinney has taken calls from fans live on air for years but volunteered the day after his confrontation with Tyler from Spartanburg that Tiger Calls would “probably” shift to another format in 2024, as many other schools have done to cut down on raw interactions between fans and coaches that can occasionally go off the rails.
“People hijack the phone call,” Swinney said Oct. 31. “They wanna hear themselves talk. That’s why most coaches around the country don’t talk calls. That reason right there. That’s probably what we’ll start doing next year.”
He offered a hypothetical featuring his wife: “They’ll go to the thing and say, ‘OK, Kathleen from Clemson. She wants to know: What’s your favorite ice cream?’”
This story was originally published August 14, 2024 at 1:51 PM.
