Dabo Swinney saying he’s ‘just a football coach’ confirms he still doesn’t get it
By Sam Dunn
Dabo Swinney’s long statement on recent Clemson controversies still misses the mark.
Has any major figure done more harm to their own image over the course of the current college football offseason than Clemson’s Dabo Swinney? The Clemson Tigers head coach has been at various times guilty of either painful silence or foot-in-mouth moments that cast him as out of touch and out to lunch.
This week, the two-time national champ stared into the camera and spoke on the controversies surrounding him and his program. But a few of the words he chose muddled his message put into question whether he really grasps what the problem was all along.
Clemson’s Dabo Swinney is either clueless or ignorant about his privilege.
A man as famous as Swinney insisting he’s “just a football coach” during a time of national turbulence on racial issues points directly to white privilege.
This man is so rich and so insulated he’s technically able to go through just about every aspect of his life, especially during this strange COVID-19 offseason, without even thinking a lick about the plight of Black bodies at the hands of violent police or a rigged justice system. If he wants to tune it out, he can — but those Clemson players and coaches whose faces don’t look like his do not have the luxury of choosing “just” to be football guys in a dangerous and unjust world.
That’s one of the unavoidable points of this entire discussion. And Dabo’s avoiding it.
Saying out loud that Black lives absolutely matter is a modest start, just like it was when Roger Goodell said it. But men like Swinney and Goodell, based on everything they’ve done to resist getting really real, simply have to meet a higher bar if they mean to convince us that they are authentically committed to the cause of ending systemic oppression that systematically targets Black Americans.
A 14-minute statement sends one type of message. But if we learn anything from this, it’s that Clemson’s head coach could stand to spend more time listening. To his credit, many of his players, including star quarterback Trevor Lawrence are defending and standing by their head coach and what is going on behind the scenes.
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