Clemson is unranked in the preseason AP Top 25 for the first time since 2011. That is a full decade and a half of preseason rankings gone. The Tigers received the most votes among teams that did not make the poll, which is the college football version of a participation trophy, but it does not change the headline. Clemson is not a preseason top-25 team anymore.
This is where Dabo Swinney’s program has landed after going 7-6 last season. Seven wins. Six losses. A bowl game they barely qualified for. That is not a bad year for a middle-tier program. It is a disaster for the program Swinney built into a national title contender for the better part of a decade.
The Dabo era is at a real crossroads, and it is worth being honest about how they got here. Swinney’s refusal to embrace the transfer portal has caught up to him in a way that his defenders cannot spin. College football changed under him, and he decided he was not going to change with it. The scoreboard is now telling him the sport does not care what he prefers.
You can build a case for wanting to develop your own players, keep a locker room culture intact, and avoid the mercenary vibe that other programs have leaned into. That is a philosophy. But that philosophy has to produce results. When your rivals are pulling starters off the portal every offseason and you are relying entirely on your high school recruiting from three years ago, you are fighting the fight with one hand tied.
Clemson used to be a national title contender every single year. They played for the championship four times in five seasons. They developed quarterbacks the rest of the country wanted. They had a defensive front that was the envy of the sport. All of that is now several years in the rearview mirror, and the current version of the Tigers is a team fighting to make bowl games.
Recruiting has slipped too. The classes are still good on paper, but they are not the elite hauls Clemson pulled during the peak years. When you combine slightly lower-rated recruiting with a refusal to supplement through the portal, you get exactly what we saw last year. Not enough talent at the top of the roster. Depth issues at critical positions. A team that cannot win the games it used to win in its sleep.
The ACC has weakened around Clemson too, which makes the drop hurt more. In a strong conference, going 7-6 might be excusable. In an ACC where Miami and Florida State have their own issues and the rest of the league is average, seven wins is the floor, not the ceiling. Clemson used to run through this conference.
The fair question now is whether Swinney’s job is safe if this year goes wrong too. That is not a hot take. That is where the conversation naturally goes when a program that spent a decade in the top five falls out of the preseason poll entirely. Athletic directors have long memories, but they also have alumni bases who expect results, and the Clemson alumni base is running out of patience.
Swinney has bought a lot of goodwill with his championships. That goodwill is real. But it is not infinite. If Clemson has another 7-6 season, or worse, the conversations about a coaching change stop being hypothetical.
The Tigers still have talent. Cade Klubnik is a real quarterback. Some of the young players on defense could pop this year. There is a version of 2026 where Clemson goes 10-2 and reminds everyone what they can be. That version is possible.
But possible is different from likely, and the preseason poll just told Dabo Swinney what the rest of the country thinks.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
