Why is post titled Wite out? Not because of some now-unoriginal gimmick, fortunately. Wite Out only because I didn’t want to use “News & Notes” again and my handy bottle of quick dry correction fluid was the first thing I saw.

• Duke plays at Clemson at 9PM. USA Today says the Tigers are looking for revenge. The line hasn’t been posted yet, but as game time approaches you should be able to find it at VegasInsider or the Daily Line section at ESPN. This game should be extra fun for me as I’ll be at a party hosted by Duke grads.

  UPDATE 2010-01-23 09:10 AMThe spread shows that Duke is favored by 1 point.

• Willy Korn is heading to Marshall… at least to visit.
• Kevin Steele is staying at Clemson, and he’s even saying the right things about why.
  

  “Regardless of what people might believe, it’s a factual statement that money was never discussed in this process with Clemson University,” he said. “I’ve never talked to (athletic director) Terry Don Phillips or Dabo Swinney about one nickel. Not one nickel. And actually did the other. I told Dabo, ‘Coach, if you want to discuss money it’s going to offend me because it’s not about money.’ “

  To be open about this, when I heard the incorrect news that Steele was leaving, I didn’t care. I wasn’t exactly thrilled by the D’s performance this year. The worst thing about the situation to me was not that he was leaving, but that we’d have to find a replacement on the fly. When news broke that he was staying, all the speculation was that he would be getting a nice raise from Clemson. That didn’t seem like such a good idea to me. He came in and, I would say, met — not exceeded — expectations. So why should he get a raise just for being contacted by alma mater? If it turned out that he was playing that game, and that Clemson played along, then I would have been pretty upset.

  Hopefully the Steele’s defense looks better in 2010.

• Clemson University apparently had extremely high voter turnout in this past election. “‘It is widely recognized that young people influenced the 2008 election by voting in larger numbers,’ said Campus Compact President Maureen Curley.” Seeing how that election came out, I don’t think I’d be bragging about that.

Addendum:

• Bad good PR: Stuckey to donate $10 for each point scored against Duke to Haitian Relief. Look, generosity is fantastic. That’s great. However, getting a press release as an NFL player earning over $400k/yr for committing to an approximately $700 donation is pretty silly. I’m hoping that it was supposed to say $100 per point. Just to be clear, the amount itself is fine, it’s the press release about the amount that bothers me.
• It appears that Kevin Steele will get a huge raise, amounting to a reported $200k on top of his current $375k/yr contract. Look, I don’t have any fucking problem with coaches making a lot of money. But I have a huge fucking problem with coaches getting gigantic raises only 1 slightly-better-than-mediocre year into a 3 year contract. If Kevin Steele deserves more money, give him an incentive based contract, and not this bullshit. If this raise is real, then everyone involved in pushing this raise through deserves a giant FUCK YOU!

Wrote Greg Wallace last Sunday:

Dabo Swinney resisted the temptation.

It was right there, sitting on a verbal platter.

Sunday afternoon, a reporter asked Clemson’s first-year coach if he had anything to say to his critics, so vociferous three weeks ago following an ugly 24-21 loss at Maryland that dropped the Tigers to 2-3.

Here was his chance for an I-told-you-so, one he’d so richly earned…

Sorry. While Dabo is certainly to be credited for putting together back-to-back wins — one of those on the road against a top-10 team — he has not earned any “I-told-you-sos”. That is, unless, he was being told that he would never beat a good team. That’s a very specific criticism that I never heard.

A season had been pulled from the brink following Clemson’s stirring 40-37 overtime win at No. 8 Miami, the first road top-25 win in three years and matching the highest-ranked opponent the Tigers had ever beaten away from Death Valley.

Again, sorry. Despite the euphoria from Saturday’s win — a win which cannot be understated — this season is still on the brink. A single loss in any of the next 4 games pretty much sends the season over the cliff. Lose to Coastal and, yeah, I think it will be hard to say the critics didn’t have a point. Else, get past Coastal and lose a remaining ACC game. Well then there goes the ACCCG and the season, like so many in recent past, will be unacceptably mediocre. Every remaining game is must-win.

Swinney, however, demurred.

Good for him. At least he’s smart enough for not taking credit before he’s actually accomplished anything.

If Wake wins on Saturday, it is, in my opinion, officially time to start looking for a new coach. I don’t say that lightly because a) over the summer I was ready to give Dabo 3 full years and b) I don’t like coaching changes.

However, I’ve recently been further considering the circumstances of Dabo’s position. His goal is not to rebuild. Rather it is to push a good team to a higher level (i.e. the conference championship game). Let’s face it, the Atlantic Division is a cesspool of football right now. A loss to Wake makes winning the division all but impossible. Leading a team out of contention for the division championship only halfway through the conference schedule is not going to easily be confused with leading the team to a higher level.

Moreover, it’s hard for Dabo to argue that he lacks talent at his disposal. There are two reasons for this. One, as Jim Grobe explained, “We don’t see anybody that has more talent than Clemson.” Second, Dabo used to be the recruiting coordinator, and he was a highly regarded one. So, Dabo is either unable to get results from the talent at his disposal, or he really wasn’t that good at recruiting in the first place. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Dabo’s only hope to justify his job is to win against Wake and then proceed to finish the season very solidly. Maybe he can get away with another conference loss so long as he beats Coastal and Carolina, but he can’t afford to lose to Wake now. Otherwise no matter how well the season ends, it will have been far too little too late.

This kind of thing is also getting on my nerves

“…I also understand that this is a football team that did a lot of things to put themselves in position to win.

“We’re a really tough holding call away and a tough third-down play by Georgia Tech, and we moved the ball against a really tough TCU defense, put ourselves in a position and we don’t win. We’re in a position to win at Maryland and we don’t win. We’ve got to learn to win.

Swinney isn’t trying to use the tired, “we were only play away” excuse from the previous coaching regime. But this kind of “keep it close” mentality hearkens back to the Bowden/Spence era. About a year ago I complained of Spence that he seemed perfectly capable of calling the plays required to win… so long as everything went as planned and no contingencies were encountered. Little has changed. Frankly, the question is not and should not be why the team is in the position and unable to win. Instead, we should all be asking why the team is spending 55 minutes putting themselves in position to win rather than spending 55 minutes removing all living doubt that they are going to win?

Or at least mildly upsetting. I’m not sure that Swinney is playing the right game.

“I’m not a guy to panic,” he said. “I don’t see any reason to panic. The biggest thing is to stay together and keep this team together. If there’s anything I’ve learned from my life, it’s that nothing comes easy.

“Keep getting up, believing in yourself, believe in your faith and you’re going to be successful. Keep swinging the axe and the tree will fall.”

That’s fine advice for a lot of things. It’s terrible advice for competitive sports. In sports there is not one “tree”, there are many. And for each “tree” there are a limited number of swings. In that regard, it’s actually a lot like at-bats in baseball. But we all know that in baseball no one gives a flying f*ck if you hit the ball eventually, they’re interested in how often you hit it and how well you do it — that is unless you’re playing T-ball. We can only pray and “have faith” that he is not using a T-ball mentality to lead this football team.

SSDC.

Same shit different coach.

Put on your orange glasses, The Tiger Nation is getting hyped again. Hey everyone! A new coach is in town and he’s better than the guy before him!! Yeah, I saw this before when Bowden replaced West, only that time Bowden WAS a head coach for an undefeated Tulane team. Yeah that isn’t D1 football per se, but there is a lot of hype going on this guy who has never been a head coach….or assistant coach, aside from last year which could be excused as a refreshed team on the back end of the season (didn’t they always do that with Bowden anyway?!?!). Along side this hype comes the complete exclusion of a offensive coordinator who, again, has never been a coordinator running an offense that somehow has “experience” after last years dismal performance. Yeah, they got experience but did they actually grow from it to a position where they are considered somewhat similar to what Whitehurst had in front of him his last year? And then there is the QB situation: 2 QBs never in the spotlight in college ball and all the pressure that is to bring. Ya know what, screw the explanatory typing, here’s a freakin list of why you shouldn’t get yourself too T-Netted (yeah I just coined that) over this years team.

• Inexperienced QB’s leading a team. One good thing is that the “toss ups” are coming to DV and not vice verse.
• 1 well defined and publicized work horse for the entire team, he won’t have a target on his back… don’t worry.
• 1 solidly defined WR, who has not gone through a season without some injury.
• 2 kickers with no definite consistency
• Do we have a punter? How about the long snapper? Not an obvious concern, but if the Tigers are relying on Defense all day they need to put the teams deep.
• The “seasoned” offensive line is still defining its guard position I think.
• Completely new offensive and defensive playbooks. I don’t know about you, but extremely aggressive blitz tactics can bite you in the ass most of the time. And the removal of bubble screen and James Davis up the middle will force the athletes to learn a lot more.

So there you have it. I am excited to see the Tigers turn the page, but man, PLEASE, do not hype the fan base into over expecting foam at the mouth idiots before the ball is even spotted! But then again… ManBearPig will be on the field so there’s always that…

There’s a good interview with Dabo by Travis Sawchik over at the P&C (note: the formatting on their site is a little off, so some of the questions aren’t bolded and it looks like Dabo is talking to himself, or, at least, I hope that’s what’s going on). Having read it, I feel a lot more comfortable with Dabo as the head coach. This paragraph stands out:

I can draw Xs and Os all day on that board; a lot of coaches come in and do great things on the board, but coaching and leadership is really about getting people to do things they don’t want to do, getting them to places they can’t take themselves. Motivating people to be great. … Coach (Bear) Bryant also talked about there are four kinds of players. You’ve got those players that have it and give it, like C.J. Spiller. You have players that have it but won’t give it — you want to get rid of those guys. Then you have players that don’t have it — and this is what the majority of your team is — but don’t know they don’t have it and give way beyond their ability. And then you have the guys that don’t have it, and know they don’t have it. You want to be nice to them because they will make great alums. … You’ve got to be able to motivate all those different guys. … I think that’s what separates good coaches from bad coaches.

Hopefully Dabo’s thoughts are translated to actions. In short, he has to convince the team that winning is more important than they currently believe it to be; this is no small task.

So you’ve got guys who A) have it and give it, B) have it and don’t give it, C) don’t have it but give it, and D) don’t have it and don’t give it. One criticism for Bowden was that he was much better at finding the “have its” than he was at developing the “don’t give its”. Any coach who can do both is going to enjoy a long and successful career.

Via Larry Williams