“Hate corrodes the vessel that carries it,” is a lesson I learned from my father. Like most lessons in my life, I only apply it when it’s convenient.
I’m not one of those, “I don’t hate anyone” holy rollers. I ain’t Jesus, and my hate is pure.
There are many people in life — primarily multimillionaire hobgoblins who consider a $600 check “substantive” for working people in the midst of a pandemic — that are worthy of my wrath.
I lost the will to hate most athletes when I realized that for the most part they’re doing a job just like the rest of us. There are a few exceptions. I would pay good money to get drunk and sucker punch the likes of Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green, Leicester striker Jamie Vardy or Pittsburgh Steelers rapist Ben Roethlisberger and his gray penis. I believe them to be bad men and I wish them nothing but misfortune in life.
However, there is one man above all whom I hold in contempt. A man that I would gladly push into a vat of acid in front of his children. A man so obnoxiously vile and smug that he has unlocked previously unknown chambers of hatred in my heart.
I speak of course about Clemson head football coach William Christopher “Dabo” Swinney.
His name alone sounds like it belongs to a slave-owning Confederate general who was largely ineffectual in combat and got bayoneted in the back by his own troops. I’m sure he has some hokey story about how a guy named Billy Christopher earned a stupid moniker like “Dabo” from his dead grandmother. I don’t want to hear it. Fuck Dabo’s dead grandmother; the world is better with her in Hell.
Dabo Swinney is a Man of God. Go ahead and ask him; he will tell you. He’s such a fan of a pacifist like Jesus, his life’s calling is to coach men in a violent children’s game that destroys their bodies and rots their minds.
He respects the U.S. Constitution, but only the parts he likes. The separation of church and state means nothing to a public university employee who baptizes his players in Rubbermaid troughs and organizes Bible Study groups.
Dabo is the type of college coach that would get laughed out of the NFL. His career depends on having total control of the day-to-day lives of his non-unionzed players. He showed his true colors in 2019 when he came out against the “professionalization” of college football:
"As far as paying players, professionalizing college athletics, that's where you lose me. We've got enough entitlement in this country as it is. To say these guys get nothing totally devalues an education. It just blows my mind people don't even want to quantify an education.
"I didn't get into coaching to make money—coaches weren't making any money when I got into coaching. It's what I wanted to do with my life, and I was able to do it because of my education. That's what changed my life. That's what changes everybody's life."
Let’s pretend for a second that Dabo doesn’t know every elite college football player is already getting paid under the table. I worry that his White Jesus may be real considering the most entitled man in the world ranted against “entitlement in this country” and wasn’t immediately smote into the ground.
He’s also acts like the price of tuition is the actual cost to a university to educate a student. It does not cost Clemson $30,500 a year to add another body to a 500-student lecture. That number has been inflated by Dabo’s generation when stature legislatures slashed funding and universities realized the private sector would gladly profiteer off students to close the financial gap.
Dabo didn’t get into coaching for money in the same way LeBron James didn’t get into basketball for the money when he picked up a basketball for the first time. Those days have long since passed.
Clemson’s defensive coordinator made $1.5 million a year when he made this comment. Dabo signed a $93 million contract shortly thereafter. He could have taken the Woody Hayes route. (Hayes famously rejected big pay days because he thought worrying about investments would detract him from his coaching duties.) But putting actions to his words has never been one of Dabo’s fortes.
Swinney has become a multimillionaire of economically exploited, predominantly black labor, so it makes sense that he purchased, wore, and posed for a photograph in a “Football Matters” t-shirt after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis re-ignited the Black Lives Matter protests throughout the country.
We’re talking about a white stiff who called Colin Kaepernick “divisive” for kneeling during our nation’s fight song:
"I don't think it's good to be a distraction to your team, to use the team as the platform. I totally disagree with that. I just think (kneeling for the national anthem) creates more divisiveness, more division."
Hmmm. Starting to sense a pattern here to how Dabo feels about public black activism!
Once he realized mocking BLM with a tasteless shirt could harm his recruitment of the black athletes on which he depends to in games, Dabo conceded he was “on board” with Black Lives Matters, just not with any actions supporting the movement — not even decals of bland social justice messages like “End Racism” on his team’s helmets or jerseys.
"I'm on board with a lot of the messages. I’m not on board with political organizations. that's a different question. I’m very apolitical when it comes to political organizations. So, I don't really support any organizations. I support common sense causes, that's for sure.
Another masterclass on smarm from Dabo, like we don’t know he votes straight MAGA. Saying you’re “apolitical” in the era of Donald Trump and Black Lives Matter is in of itself a political statement. Dabo is endorsing the status quo, which to be fair to him works well for filthy rich white men. Of course he can’t understand why anybody who want to change that. His salary depends on it
It’s about control for guys like Dabo. He couldn’t help but bully the one player on his roster that couldn’t whip his tiny ass after the amateur shanked a field goal during a game in which the Tigers led by four touchdowns in the second quarter.
I didn’t think it was possible for me to hate Dabo more than I did after an SEC radio host moonlighting as a referee allowed Clemson’s coach to escape his pine box by overturning Ohio State safety Jordan Fuller’s decisive scoop-and-score in the 2020 Fiesta Bowl.
But then a random Chinese man bit into a bat halfway around the world and unleashed a global pandemic that caught America flatfooted in no small part due to our president being a lazy oaf with burnt applesauce where his brain is supposed to be.
By April, COVID-19 had infected 3.2 million people worldwide and killed at least 233,000 people. The novel virus had bugged over a million Americans and killed at least 63,000 of them.
While other coaches like LSU’s Ed Orgeron and Ohio State’s Ryan Day filmed PSAs to warn their fans about the threat poised by the invisible enemy, Dr. Dabo was assuring us it would be no big deal because a bunch of our countrymen who are mostly dead did a bunch of heroic shit 50 years ago.
“This is America, man. We’ve stormed the beaches of Normandy. We’ve driven a car on Mars. We’ve walked on the moon. We have the smartest people in the world. We’re going to rise up and we”e going to kick this thing right in the teeth and get back to our lives.”
While most of the country was still in lockdown and the Center for Disease Control strongly advised against unnecessary interstate travel, Dabo couldn’t even self-isolate in whatever ostentatious manse in which he undoubtedly lives. He was entitled to a vaction.
“The coach also noted that his family has traveled once to Florida via private plane for vacation and may do so [again] for Easter. ‘The plane was sanitized,’ he said. ‘We don’t have any concern.’ ”
Dabo didn’t have any concern because he’s rich enough to afford access to the best healthcare system in the world. He didn’t have any concern for people ordered back to work by their government and forced to cater to his vacationing family as their only means to paying rent in a pandemic.
As of this writing, “the smartest people in the world” who would “kick [coronavirus] right in the teeth and get back to our lives” have fostered the world’s No. 1 COVID-19 hotspot in Month 8 of the pandemic. Over 18 million Americans have gotten sick while at least 320,000 have perished.
Has Dabo taken any time to reflect on the cost of his flagrant ignorance? Well, if you’re reading this far then you already know this pompous asshole has never reflected a day in his life.
His star safety had to redshirt due to losing 20 pounds battling coronavirus. He had to suffer the indignity of losing a football game to Notre Dame because his star quarterback caught coronavirus and had to miss the game.
He let a backup offensive lineman showing symptoms of coronavirus travel to Florida State. When FSU doctors canceled the game over the potential of a super-spreader event, Dabo claimed the administration had “forfeited” the game, saying they had used COVID-19 “as an excuse.”
He (unsuccessfully) argued that the College Football Playoff Committee should penalize teams whose conferences didn’t rush gung-ho into allowing their ostensibly amateur athletes to travel and play in a pandemic that was still without a vaccine.
Again, the maddening thing about Dabo is there is always a new level of fuckery to his grating personality. Ohio State drawing a rematch with Clemson was enough to pull me back into the season even if I’m not quite sure if the Buckeyes are a championship-caliber team. There is zero doubt he would feel differently of the COVID slipper went on the other foot (and it still may!).
For years, I’ve wanted this dude entombed next to Osama bin Laden in an unmarked grave. I figured I had become inured to his grating personality and moronic thoughts that inevitably come tumbling out of his eleven-looking skull.
I should have known better.
Dabo’s latest Coaches Poll offers insight to every insufferable trait of his incorrigible personality.
He’s engaging in false humility when he ranks Alabama above Clemson. There is zero doubt that Dabo considers his team the best in the country. But despite winning two national titles, he constantly mewls about not getting respect from “the media,” as if that’s a monolithic institution.
Most Ohio State fans noticed that Dabo ranked their Buckeyes as the No. 11 team in the country. In a true “fuck you,” it’s one spot ahead of mighty Coastal Carolina. That’s laughably petty.
But don’t sleep on Dabo ranking Notre Dame’s sorry-ass at No. 3. He would apparently rather play the team he bludgeoned last weekend instead of the 11th-best team in the country. He wants the easiest path to the title game because he think a spot in that game opposite of Alabama is his birthright.
Remember, Dabo only hates entitlement in other people.
I would detest Dabo even if he wern’t 3-0 against my favorite football team which somehow can’t figure out how to beat a tiny school from rural South Carolina in a football game.
There’s a reason Ryan Day mentioned Clemson first in his post-Big Ten championship screed that running back Demario McCall broadcasted to the world for our joy and his (probable) detriment.
Dabo took something from Day last year just like he robbed the rest of us. He knows more than anyone just how close he came to getting put in the pine box and buried alive in the Arizona desert.
When five-star recruit D.J. Uiagalelei, the No. 1 quarterback of the 2020 class, visited Clemson and spoke to Swinney, he called his mom and said, “You can feel the presence of God. He’s here mom. He’s here.”
A man recruiting a teenager into a backwoods religious cult used to be a cause for concern in this country. But if by some chance Dabo does stand with the Lord, then I will venture to the depths of Hell before next Friday and exchange my soul to get this freak out of my life forever.
The hottest flames in Hell cannot be as painful as having to listen to this whiny, hypocritical asshole any longer.
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