Counterpoint: Dabo Swinney Coaching the Jacksonville Jaguars is Not a Perfect Situation
By Kyle Koster
The Jacksonville Jaguars have taken a detour to irrelevancy after a poor call prevented them from making the Super Bowl not so long ago. Releasing running back Leonard Fournette this morning signaled that the quest for answers is nowhere near its termination point. All future options appear to be on the table and, at this point, going in a bold direction may be the best course.
Still, Mike Tannenbaum going on Get Up to suggest bringing in both Dabo Swinney and Trevor Lawrence from Clemson to fix everything seems a bit far-fetched. Even more far-fetched is the idea that such a situation, in Tannenbaum's words, would be perfect.
"“There’s a lot of speculation in the league that Dabo Swinney, who has been on the short list of multiple head coaching searches, could be a coach that teams want to talk about. And this would really be the perfect storm.""
And there's more.
"“He’s immensely popular in that area of the country, and if he could go with Trevor Lawrence from Clemson right down the road to Jacksonville, with all those picks and all that cap room, that’s the ideal situation,” he said. “I know in talking to a number of NFL general managers, they see Dabo Swinney in the same mold of a Pete Carroll — a high energy guy. ... If Swinney would ever go, this is the perfect storm to do it with following this season.”"
Much like a polite-but-still-nonplussed Frances McDormand in Fargo, I am going to go ahead and disagree with some of the police work here. Swinney can be on all the short lists in the world but that doesn't change the fundamental problem of his personality, which works, uh, perfectly actually at the one place he's at. He's perfectly suited in a position where he can be the most successful right now.
I am unsure how serious of an endeavor even floating this idea was so I'm reluctant to innumerate all the issues. But using Swinney's popularity in South Carolina to explain why he'll be popular in northern Florida doesn't make a ton of sense to me either. Unscientifically, it would seem that there'd be a major swatch of crossover Jags/Florida State fans who don't exactly love Swinney. And though Carroll has been successful in his second go-around as an NFL coach, the first foray didn't exactly go smoothly.
It's probably also worth mentioning that securing Lawrence would require stumbling to the league's worst record this year and completely abandoning the Gardner Minshew experiment which, though not complete with the highest ceiling, is probably worth exploring further without tanking.
For all these reasons and even more, I respectfully disagree with Tannenbaum. All of this sounds far from perfect yet perhaps perfect from afar.