One of Swinney’s biggest longtime critics is ESPN’s Paul Finebaum. Finebaum wasted no time laying into Swinney, calling him “stupid” and implying that college football has passed him by.

“Sadly, it seems like Dabo, this time, is really done at Clemson,” says Finebaum on Get Up Monday. “We have been writing them off for some time, but they’ve been hanging around. But they were up against the best kid on the block on Saturday, and they got manhandled. There’s nowhere to go for Dabo Swinney. He can complain about the criticism. He can say he’s doing the right thing. But clearly, he has screwed up badly, refusing to go into the portal.”

“Nobody’s trying to make Dabo out to be terrible, but what he is is stubborn, and I would go so far as to say stupid,” Finebaum later added. “Because if you don’t use the tools you have at your disposal, you’re dumb in today’s world of college football. The problem is, we can’t have a conversation with Dabo Swinney without talking about the past. We’re living in the present and moving toward the future, and I’m around Clemson fans. I don’t live too far from where Clemson University is headquartered, and, quite frankly, those fans are frustrated, too.”

What went wrong with Clemson football since 2020

The low hanging fruit for Clemson’s falloff in recent years is the unwillingness of Dabo Swinney to use the transfer portal to build out his roster, and that’s certainly a big factor. Clemson has still not started a single transfer player in the portal era, and they were the only team in the FBS to not add a transfer this offseason.

However, the issues cut deeper than that. The reality is, Swinney isn’t attracting the same talent that he did in the 2010s, especially at the skill positions.

The reality is Swinney and Clemson had six consecutive years of arguably the best quarterback play in the country in Deshaun Watson and Trevor Lawrence. Those two were always throwing to elite, NFL-caliber receivers such as Tee Higgins, Mike Williams, Justyn Ross, Hunter Renfrow and more. Travis Etienne was an explosive home run threat at running back.

Clemson’s defenses since 2020 have mostly still been very good. But Swinney’s inability to recruit the offensive skill positions at the highest level over the last five years, whether it be in the portal or in the high school ranks, have caused Clemson football to fall behind the rest of the pack.