Dabo Swinney on Clemson's season: It's all about how you finish
The Clemson Tigers are still in the hunt for a College Football Playoff berth, although it doesn’t feel like it. To start this week, Clemson is behind two two-loss teams despite only having one loss on the year. Still, head coach Dabo Swinney believes his team controls their own destiny. So his advice to his Tigers entering into the fourth quarter of the season? Never mind what happened in the past, to accomplish their goals, “it’s all about finishing.”
“It’s all about the finish. It’s all about finishing,” said Swinney. “That’s what everybody remembers, right? That’s what they say; they remember November. You go lose these next two games; everybody forgets that you are 9-1 quick. You know, if you lose one early, we got some teams in the playoffs that have lost one early, bad, and now all everybody talks about is what they’re doing right now. So, you’ve got to finish, and that’s a mentality; that’s a mindset.”
Despite having a better record the College Football Playoff committee has LSU and Alabama ranked ahead of Clemson. Both teams have two losses with Alabama losing to LSU and Tennessee and the Tigers getting romped at home by Tennessee and losing to Florida State. Still Clemson needs to make sure they have their best stuff from here on out.
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“You want to be at your best this time of year. It’s hard to do that. Most teams grow weary; the great ones grow stronger. So, we just want to grow stronger; we want to get hot and play our best football. We’ve got a lot of lessons that we’ve learned, and we’ve got a lot of information. But information without application gets no transformation. We want to be a team that shows up and plays our best football here in the fourth quarter.”
Clemson has two more regular season games left — Miami followed by South Carolina. After that, they will face the North Carolina Tar Heels in a likely battle of one-loss ACC teams. If Clemson can finish off the year strong, that could be enough to convince the CPF committee of their worthiness of a playoff spot.