The Different Fortunes of Duke and Clemson
Monday’s game between the Clemson Tigers and the Duke Blue Devils meant two very different things for the schools and their respective coaches.
For Duke coach Mike Elko, Monday’s 28-7 win for the Blue Devils was validation. Elko will never admit it, but Duke football is one of the toughest jobs in the nation. The school will always have high academic standards, which puts some top players off-limits for its teams, and that makes it tough to win a numbers game like football. But Elko has shown you can win at Duke by recruiting well out of high school and using the transfer portal in a way that makes sense for his school. He’ll probably never win a national championship in Durham, but he can make Duke a consistent bowl contender.
For Clemson coach Dabo Swinney, however, Monday was an indictment.
Nobody needs to tell Swinney Clemson can win a national championship; he’s already done it twice. He’s also won seven of the past eight ACC championships, including last year. On the surface, that makes the title of this article look ridiculous.
And yet, there’s real truth to it. If things don’t change fast, Clemson is going to lose its ACC title in December. Maybe they’ll lose it to Florida State, which looked great against LSU and has its sights set on its Sept. 23 meeting with the Tigers. Maybe it’ll come against North Carolina, which made a statement of its own against Clemson’s rival South Carolina. It might even be that they lose it to Duke, which now believes it can play with anyone in the ACC.
Here’s why it’s happening.
Swinney Refuses to Embrace the Transfer Portal
It’s appropriate that Clemson’s reckoning came at Duke, because Swinney’s situation at Clemson is quite similar to where Duke basketball legend Mike Krzyzewski sat 19 years ago. In 2004, Krzyzewski was winning big with experience, as he’d made his pitch one of telling the best players that he’d put them on a path to go to the NBA in three years instead of four. But then Luol Deng left after a year and Shaun Livingston never set foot on campus, opting to go to the NBA.
Krzyzewski decided he was done recruiting the best of the best, because they’d just leave in a year. Instead, he tried to win with three and four-year players. Most years, it didn’t work, as Duke regularly found itself bludgeoned by younger, more talented teams. Only after watching rival North Carolina win two national championships did Krzyzewski realize that if he didn’t recruit the best players for a year, he’d be playing against them for a year.
Swinney has proven just as obstinate on the transfer portal. Clemson almost never adds guys from the portal, opting to build around high school athletes over three years. And while that’s a reasonable long-term approach and ensures Clemson will be consistently good, it also means Clemson will almost never be great. Unless you can recruit a Deshaun Watson or a Trevor Lawrence, you will have a drop-off one out of four or five years with Swinney’s approach.
There’s another issue: Swinney’s rivals aren’t waiting around. While Clemson brings in top freshmen and waits for them to become juniors, Florida State coach Mike Norvell finds the holes he needs to plug and finds good fits in the portal. And for the first time since Jimbo Fisher left Tallahassee, the Seminoles, not the Tigers, look like the ACC’s best.
Swinney Hasn’t Needed To Change — Yet
Swinney has seven big reasons not to change his approach. Nobody’s caught Clemson yet in the ACC, so why should he alter what has worked?
Well, Monday might be the beginning of the end of that thinking. Clemson has only played Duke twice in 15 years, and both times, Swinney’s team easily had better athletes than the Blue Devils. That wasn’t true on Monday. Duke was Clemson’s equal in terms of both athleticism and discipline. The former should not happen with Clemson’s built-in advantages. A game like that might be the push Swinney needs to make adjustments.
What Will Clemson Do Moving Forward?
Clemson will get better as the season progresses. The Tigers are still talented, and they moved the ball regularly against the Blue Devil defense. Clemson lost by three touchdowns, but that’s because the Tigers left at least 20 points on the field. They had two failed field goal attempts and had two first-and-goals inside the one that ended with fumbles.
Those mistakes are common with a young team. Clemson likely would have gotten away with them against Charleston Southern or Florida Atlantic or even Georgia Tech, which is a testament to how well Elko has built the Blue Devils. But the Tigers don’t have time to make these mistakes if they want to compete for national championships.
One of two things is going to happen: either Clemson will have to accept being a good ACC program that has one or two chances a decade at a national title, or Swinney will have to accept the necessity of the portal. As Krzyzewski showed, you can teach an old coach new tricks, but only if they want to learn.