Dabo Swinney’s Regressive NIL Stance Comes Up, Again

Dabo Swinney has always been against payment for players. In a recent ESPN interview, his newfound, ostensible support for player payment hits a few roadblocks.

In 2014, players from Northwestern attempted to unionize. Arguments raged about whether college athletics was a job that deserved payment or unionization efforts. In that fray of public opinion, Clemson football head coach Dabo Swinney opined that he’d “go do something else” if players were allowed to be paid.

Seven years later, the name, image, and likeness (NIL) policy allowed college athletes to seek endorsement deals. Seven years later, Swinney is the Clemson football head coach.

The Clemson head man has always been a traditionalist when it comes to the sport’s makeup, even dating back to his own college days at Alabama. Yet, when he talked with ESPN’s Chris Low just before Clemson football’s spring game, he seemed resigned to college football’s new reality.

Indeed, Clemson has launched their own in-house NIL brand. “Reign” as it’s known, is still in the mumbo-jumbo-word-salad phase right now. What it signifies, though, is that Swinney knows he must do this if he wants to keep his ambitions going.

Of course, in his interview with ESPN, he still got in a few parting shots at the new landscape. Some of his opinions are noble, such as not wanting to go into the transfer portal unless the incoming player is at a position of need. Some of his opinions are just plain correct, such as college football needing reorganization under this new landscape.

But, in his comments on the NIL, he gives a window into what he really thinks.

When asked about how much the NIL has changed college football, he stated, “There’s no rules, no guidance, no nothing. It’s out of control. . . It’s an absolute mess and a train wreck. . .”

He does say eventually that he likes that players can go get some money, but taken together, they’re very contradictory statements. The rules of the NIL – even in their interim state – are clear about what the lay of the land is with endorsement deals.

Dabo Swinney still doesn’t get it

Is the amount of money the part that’s out of control? Because, when asked about his salary, Dabo Swinney is very non-apologetic about the $8.5 million he’ll make in 2022.

“It’s a free market we live in, in anything. . . None of us got into coaching to make money, but I don’t apologize for being successful.”

If the free market says that Travis Hunter should get $870,000 per year to go to Jackson State, isn’t that what Swinney wants? His words now say yes; his history of statements to the contrary say no.

At most, players are getting tiny fractions of the value they create for their schools. The NIL landscape has corrected that to a degree, but the big money is still off the table.

Television contracts, media rights, and event ticket sales, all of that are still off-limits to players. Even if a player’s scholarship counts as payment, $30,000 to $40,000 is a pittance for such a visible, violent game.

But, Swinney doesn’t want his players to look there. On pay-for-play, Swinney states that people come after him because he’s against such a scheme. Most of his moral panic is that the kids are too young to have that kind of money and responsibility thrown at them.

Concerns about 17 and 18-year-olds entering into professional contracts are valid, to a degree. However, as any college student with a merit scholarship knows, scholarships are their own kind of pressure-packed contract.

Colleges have already cut kids for having serious injuries or lack of talent. The only difference in a pay-to-play scheme is that players make a little extra money before that happens.

Dabo Swinney’s idyllic view of college football is a fairytale, something Ronald Reagan’s George Gipp would recognize. Players should play for a scholarship because they love the game and nothing else. That world still exists in lower divisions, but Dabo wouldn’t make $8.5 million coaching in it.