Dabo Swinney just dropped the quintessential Dabo Swinney cringe bomb

No one would ever mistake Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney for the coolest in college football, but his latest NIL comment is as cringe as it gets.

For anyone who isn’t a Clemson Tigers fan, head coach Dabo Swinney can be a bit off-putting with his dad-from-7th-Heaven-coaching college football energy that he often has on display. In the simplest terms, he can be as corny as they come. But he’s also been a bit barrel-chested about certain things, including famously saying he’d quit coaching if players in college ever got paid.

Well, players are now getting fairly compensated from NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) money and, what do ya know, Dabo Swinney is still the coach at Clemson. However, it was on Wednesday during Early Signing Day for the 2023 recruiting class that he started talking about NIL again and delivered a truly ridiculous quote.

Please try to pick your jaws off the floor as you see him talk about name, image and likeness in a manner there’s no way you’ll see coming.

Clemson HC Dabo Swinney was king of cringe with his NIL comment

For those who need to see that written out, Swinney said, “We built this program on NIL. We really did. … We built this program in God’s Name, Image and Likeness.”

This isn’t about mocking a man for his religious beliefs — not in the slightest. This is about that being the absolute corniest and cringe thing that a head coach at a perennial contender could possibly say about one of the vital aspects of college football in the new modern era of the sport.

Hats off to him if that is indeed how Swinney built his program. With that said, it feels like a dad-joke dismissal of NIL from a man who has shirked that idea previously. And when you then consider that he and his staff failed to crack the Top 10 in recruiting as of Wednesday’s Early Signing Day, that becomes even harder to swallow. That’s even more so the case with the past couple of years that have been down by Clemson standards as well.

Dabo Swinney has undoubtedly built a great program. But if this is the type of wince-inducing stuff he’s going to keep saying now, we might need to take the microphone away from him.

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