5 candidates to be next Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach
1. Dabo Swinney
Harbaugh was the real No. 1, but we need to go down the rabbit hole and get weird with an option. It doesn’t get any weirder than Dabo Swinney.
His actual desire to jump from Clemson to the NFL is unclear, especially as the Tigers prepare for another appearance in the College Football Playoff. But when his name surfaced as a candidate for the Cleveland Browns’ job, he didn’t exactly rule out eventually making the jump.
"I’m very happy where I am and I’m very happy coaching college football,” Swinney said a few months ago. “The great thing about college players is a chance to really build young men, on and off the field. But the NFL is great. I love the NFL. I would never say never. But right now, I’m a college coach."
Swinney can coach at Clemson as long as he’d like to, and if he were to leave it seems more likely he’d succeed Nick Saban at Alabama. But he did offer a caveat, based on the speculation attaching him to the Browns, that may give Buccaneers’ fans hope.
"It’s cold in Cleveland, isn’t it? I hate the cold,"
Cold weather is obviously not a factor in Florida, but cold hard cash might be hard for the Buccaneers to compete with. According to USA Today’s salary database, Swinney is the seventh highest-paid head coach in college football this season, with a scheduled $6.6 million base salary in the final year of a contract that runs through 2024. But as Adam Rittenberg of ESPN also noted, Swinney’s buyout is $6 million if he leaves for another job before Jan. 1, 2019, and drops to $4 million after that.
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If Tampa Bay is casting a wide net as they prepare to replace Koetter, Swinney would be one of the bigger-named fish. The percentage chance he leaves Clemson for the Buccaneers is not too far above zero, but a phone call to Swinney’s agent from a Tampa Bay area code is simply good due diligence and what if he says yes to an interview?