Clemson football: Dabo is the college football coaching version of LeBron James

Clemson football head coach Dabo Swinney should have more than one Bobby Dodd Coach of the Year award.

The Dodd Trophy released its 2020 watch list and Clemson football head coach Dabo Swinney is among the 22 coaches that were on the list. The Dodd Trophy split the list into two separate categories with 13 actual nominees with a chance to win and nine additional others from the Big Ten and Pac-12 who will not play until after the Dodd award has been handed out.

Coach Swinney has won the award once previously – in 2011. Only two coaches in the history of the award have won it twice – former Penn State head coach Joe Paterno in 1981 and 2005 as well as former Kansas State legend Bill Snyder who won the award in 1998 and 2012.

You cannot help but look at this list and wonder why coaches like Dabo Swinney and Nick Saban have not won the award more than once each. Sure, their teams are expected to be great and play for national titles every year, so delivering on those expectations should be rewarded with personal awards such as this one.

Any coach, like Ed Orgeron at LSU, can be a one-hit-wonder and come out of nowhere to win a national title. However, head coaches like Swinney and Saban have had their teams at the top of the college football world for years and meet these incredible expectations while being the hunted.

It is a lot harder to meet national championship expectations and get everyone’s best every single week like Clemson football than it is to be the underdog and prepare to play games as an overlooked opponent.

Swinney is the college football version of Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Wayne Gretzky.

Before you scream for me to take my orange-colored glasses off, give me a chance to explain.

By this, I mean that every year in which MJ, Kobe, LeBron, or The Great One were in their primes, they should have been given the award for Most Valuable Player in their respective leagues. However, voters always looked for more reasons to discredit them for the award because they were superior to everyone else and they didn’t want fans to think there was a bias.

Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Wayne Gretzky played a combined 75 seasons to date and won just 19 MVP awards with Gretzky winning nine of them.

This is the same with Dabo Swinney.

Here is a prime example. In 2018, Dabo Swinney led Clemson football to a 15-0 record and a national title, in doing so they became the first team in modern-day college football to go 15-0 and win a national title. That year, they embarrassed both Notre Dame and Alabama en route to that title.

However, Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly was awarded the Bobby Dodd coaches award. How does a coach who became the first-ever coach to accomplish something of that magnitude, not win the coach of the year honor? I get it, many of you by this point are saying, he doesn’t coach for personal recognition and you would be right, however, I have the pleasure of talking about these things.

If Dabo is able to lead Clemson football to their third national title in five years, not only is Dabo the national coach of the year, but it’s time to start talking about him being among the all-time greats to ever coach the game of football.