Paul Finebaum has nothing but truth bombs for ‘terrible’ Dabo Swinney
By Sam Dunn
Paul Finebaum took issue with Clemson’s Dabo Swinney.
Has any member of college football’s landed gentry taken more of a hit this offseason than Dabo Swinney? Coming off a humbling national championship defeat against LSU, the Clemson Tigers boss needed to hit the spring with a revived sense of purpose. Unfortunately, he’s suffered a series of missteps — and Paul Finebaum can’t ignore it.
In a recent appearance on WJOX radio in Birmingham, Alabama, the talking head issued a rough review of how Swinney’s offseason looks so far: “terrible.”
Paul Finebaum blasts Clemson coach Dabo Swinney.
“Dabo Swinney can choose to do what he wants to do, but I can tell you from reasonable people, he looks terrible right now,” Finebaum said, pointing first to the coach’s less-than-assertive approach to the recently-revealed racial slur controversy concerning assistant coach Danny Pearman. “[T]here’s also no getting around the fact that Dabo Swinney has been silent for almost a week at a time in our country when silence is abhorrent.”
In reference to Swinney’s insistence that these days of unrest over systemic racial oppression and police brutality are a product of “sin” without much additional elaboration — or essential human empathy, to be sure — Swinney continues to cast himself as a hands-off during a time in which no one with such an expansive, influential platform can afford to stay silent.
It’s not like Finebaum is some kind of progressive HuffPost blogger; that makes his Swinney truth bombs hit with all the more impact. Football Matters? At a time like this, in which even problematic figures like Roger Goodell and Mitt Romney are suddenly declaring without reservation that Black Lives Matter? There’s tone-deaf, and then there’s willfully offensive defiance.
Swinney may be something adjacent to a god-like figure at Clemson, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t live in society. Of course, if he wants to set the record straight at long last, he can always appear on Finebaum’s show.
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