Trevor Lawrence Reflects on Clemson's Dabo Swinney

Dabo Swinney helped to land Trevor Lawrence by beating Alabama in the 2017 national championship. And after the unique Clemson head coach landed the unique quarterback, Lawrence led Swinney’s Tigers to another national-championship triumph over Alabama.

“What you see really is what you get with him,” Lawrence said on Monday’s edition of the Pardon My Take podcast. “He doesn't put on a fake personality. That's why sometimes he'll say stuff in the media. I remember when I was there, he'd say something in the media, and people would kill him for it, and he just doesn't care.”

Learning from Swinney how to tune out the noise might’ve been one of Lawrence’s most important lessons, especially as critics are already saying the former No. 1-overall selection is approaching bust territory.  

Lawrence answered critics with an immediate exclamation point in 2018, when he joined Oklahoma’s Jamelle Holieway (1985) as one of two true freshmen ever to lead their teams to national championships. Lawrence led the nation with 30 touchdown passes that year. He also paced the country in passer rating as a freshman and sophomore. Swinney got the most out of him.

“He’s not a huge Xs and Os guy,” Lawrence explained, “but he's a motivator, gives a vision. Our team meetings would be so long, but he kept our attention. … He would make you believe you could do anything.

“It didn't matter who we were playing, like ‘We're gonna kill these dudes.’ And it could be a team that's better than us.”

And that level of confidence is significant for a player who rarely went under center and rarely used a cadence before he entered the NFL. His ability now to mesh with the offense of Liam Coen, his third head coach in five seasons, will go a long way toward that end. In a best-case scenario, Coen, Lawrence and the Jaguars would adopt that confidence to surprise teams like Kansas City, Buffalo and Baltimore the way Clemson surprised Alabama.

“Clemson before Dabo gets there, they were good,” Lawrence said. “But there was also a joke, ‘Clemsoning,’ always being good but not great, and then he took it to another level.

“Also, the thing that Dabo deserves a ton of credit for is he broke it up. He was the guy who won, other than Nick Saban, in that era. Nick Saban dominated college football, and Dabo was like, ‘No, I got teams that can compete.’ I feel like with head coaches, it's always a balance. You have some head coaches that are just very cerebral; they just think football, and they kind of miss that motivational-leadership aspect of it. And then he is the opposite, and I think that there has to be a fusion.”

No one is putting the Jaguars in the market for a new starting quarterback next season, at least not yet, Swinney is grooming his next first-round quarterback. Cade Klubnik is already considered by some the top prospect in a deep 2026 quarterback draft class. Swinney, Klubnik and the Tigers open the season Aug. 30 at home against LSU.

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