Dabo Swinney and Billy Napier will always be linked to one another, both serving on Tommy Bowden’s final staff at Clemson in 2008. When Swinney was elevated to full-time coach after Bowden’s firing, he kept Napier on staff, making him the youngest offensive coordinator in school history (29).
Their paths winded away from each other after Swinney fired Napier in 2010. Swinney molded the Tigers into a national power, while Napier had multiple stops as an assistant — including at Alabama, where he coached against the Tigers in two national title games — before taking over the Louisiana program and parlaying that into the Florida job. But on Saturday, they stood on sidelines in Atlanta and Gainesville, Florida, respectively, and had eerily similar experiences to each other as their teams continue on downward trajectories.
It’s not that they lost, but how. Both the Clemson and Florida programs look stuck while Georgia and Miami were the far more finished products out of the blocks. Clemson failed to score a touchdown for only the fourth time in 214 games under Swinney; one of the other times was when the Tigers and Bulldogs faced off to open the 2021 season.
Much is made about Clemson’s lack of transfer portal activity. The Tigers did not take any players from the portal this offseason, and since the portal was implemented in 2018, they haven’t had an incoming transfer make any starts for them at all, according to ESPN’s Kevin Naghandi.
There are different ways to augment a roster in the portal. There’s the Colorado approach with a full-scale overhaul (43 total incomings), but there’s also the Georgia (11) or Ohio State approach (nine), which is to add judiciously where it makes sense to an already-stacked roster. The Buckeyes, of…
Source link : https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/the-monday-read-billy-napier-dabo-swinney-intertwined-again-with-florida-clemson-trounced-in-openers/
Author : Richard Johnson
Publish date : 2024-09-02 16:25:00
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