‘Stuck on stupid’: Paul Finebaum rips Dabo Swinney, Clemson football
Clemson head football coach Dabo Swinney believes last year’s 7-6 season was just a bump in the road for the Tigers. Longtime college football commentator Paul Finebaum, however, doesn’t share that opinion.
Swinney acknowledged at ACC media days in Charlotte on Wednesday that the storyline surrounding his team coming into the 2026 season would be about the poor performance last year. At the same time, Swinney used it as an opportunity to remind everyone that Clemson is still a legitimate program by citing the success — two national championships and nine ACC titles — it has had in the last 15 years.
“We’ve won 11 championships in the last 15 years,” Swinney said. “And then you have a season like last year and that’s kind of want everybody wants to focus on.”
Finebaum vehemently disagreed and didn’t hold back when he was asked about Swinney’s comments during an appearance on ESPN’s “Get Up” on Friday morning.
“I am getting so just exasperated listening to Dabo tell us how great he used to be,” Finebaum said. “They’re not great anymore. You don’t hear (Tom) Brady talking about his Super Bowls or LeBron (James) or any of the greats — I mean, Dabo is just stuck on stupid right now trying to convince us that his program is still legitimate. It’s not. It’s slipping and sliding away. It’s good. Maybe they’ll win nine games this year, maybe they won’t. But they lost six games last year with the Heisman favorite. That is downright embarrassing.”
Clemson came into 2025 with sky-high expectations. Quarterback Cade Klubnik and the Tigers were ranked No. 4 in the Associated Press Preseason Top 25 poll. Instead, the Tigers finished unranked with a 7-6 record and loss in the Pinstripe Bowl.
That record marks the second-lowest win total of Swinney’s 18-year tenure at the helm of the program. It was also just the fourth time Clemson finished with fewer than 10 wins with Swinney as head coach, excluding 2008, when he took over midway through the season.
Clemson enters the 2026 season at No. 19 in ESPN’s College Football Power Index (FPI) preseason Top 25 rankings. The FPI projects the Tigers to go 8-4 this season, but gives Swinney’s squad a 9.5% chance to win the ACC and a 21.1% chance of making the playoffs.
