Not that ever-demanding Clemson fans have been taking it easy or anything on Dabo Swinney through his first two years as head coach – not by a long shot – but he has managed to largely avoid the charge that ultimately sunk his predecessor: Squandering championship talent. Tommy Bowden got by for nearly a decade on a string of respectable records, until a succession of top-20 recruiting classes helped push expectations to a fever pitch going into 2008. The team flopped, Bowden was fired at midseason and Swinney stepped into the breach of a bona fide rebuilding job. If his second team underachieved last year at 6-7 – Clemson's first losing season since 1998, the year before Bowden's arrival – at least it wasn't on the heels of top-10 ambition. (Or, in this case, even top-25 ambition.)
Year Three brings higher expectations in any case, but Swinney raised the bar himself for the first time this week with arguably the most blockbuster recruiting class in school history. With surprise signatures from a pair of five-star linebackers, Tony Steward and Stephone Anthony, to go with standing commitments from five-star running back Mike Bellamy and receiver Sammy Watkins, Clemson landed four of Rivals' top 25 overall prospects in the country, more than any other school. In all, the Tigers turned in Rivals' No. 8 class nationally, their first top-10 recruiting effort since Rivals started keeping track in 2002.
That number will go up if Swinney can sway another elite, five-star headliner, instate defensive end Jadeveon Clowney, who has reportedly elevated Clemson alongside rival South Carolina (and possibly Alabama) as the top suitors for his signature on his birthday, Feb. 14, two days after he plans to make one final stop on campus for the Tigers' basketball game against North Carolina.
Clowney's addition could raise the class to a startling new level, but with or without him, the last-second surge for Steward and Anthony on Wednesday felt like the moment the assumptions, excuses and other vestiges of the Bowden era were finally extinguished for an identity that's entirely Swinney's. To this point, it's been hard to say exactly what that means: From the outside, the last two years seemed like extended highlight reels for Bowden's most coveted recruits, C.J. Spiller and Da'Quan Bowers, with typically nondescript results in the standings. A star-laden, top-10 recruiting class is the first hint that Swinney may be building something more substantial – or at least, that he's capable of it.
That's an empty victory, of course, if he can't keep the ship steady enough for the new pipeline to begin paying off in two or three years; in the meantime, the hype is always a threat to turn into an indomitable beast unto itself if it continues to outpace the results over time; just ask Tommy Bowden. But the initial buzz out of signing day is more than Clemson has generated on the field in ages, at precisely the time Swinney needed it to establish a new, optimistic direction out of the mediocrity. If it's only a first step toward the eventual goal of a long-awaited ACC championship and a coveted BCS berth, it's a big one, at it's finally going in the right direction.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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