Football
It’s no secret that Dabo Swinney played his college football for the Alabama Crimson Tide. But how important was his career in Tuscaloosa?
Recently, ESPN decided to rank and tier every FBS coach by their playing careers. Some made the Top 30, including Colorado’s Deion Sanders. Some didn’t even play college football, such as Hugh Freeze at Auburn.
Others, like Swinney, the long-time Tigers coach, played, but didn’t make much of a name for themselves.
ESPN created eight different tiers. Swinney landed with a group of 20 coaches under “big school, limited production.”
They don’t get much bigger than Alabama.
Swinney grew up in Birmingham, Ala., and went to Pelham High School. He could have played college basketball, but once he knew he could get into Alabama that didn’t matter. He decided to walk on for the football program.
He participated in 1989 as a walk-on, and then in 1990 he was moved to scholarship. He was a wide receiver on the Crimson Tide’s 1992 national championship team led by coach Gene Stallings.
While Swinney has that national title ring, his actual career wasn’t much to write home about. He caught seven passes.
After his career was done in 1992, Swinney moved into coaching and remained on staff as a graduate assistant at Alabama under Stallings, who played for and coached under Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant.
Swinney eventually became a wide receivers coach for the Tide until after the 2000 season when he and the staff were let go in the wake of the firing of then-head coach Mike Dubose.
Swinney was out of coaching for more than two years, working in commercial real estate. Then-Clemson head coach Tommy Bowden threw Swinney — and as it turns out the Tigers — a lifeline and hired him as wide receivers coach in 2003. By 2008, he was the assistant head coach.
When the Tigers fired Bowden, they made Swinney the interim head coach. The rest, as they say, is history.
He enters this season with a record of 180-47, a 12-9 bowl game record and two national championships. The Tigers have won nine ACC crowns — including a run of six straight from 2015-20. This year’s team is considered a national championship contender with quarterback Cade Klubnik at the controls.
In addition, he’s won the Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant Award three times for national coach of the year.
Not bad for a walk-on that only caught seven career college football passes.
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