GREENSBORO, N.C. — Dabo Swinney was there last time Clemson was picked to win the Atlantic Coast Conference. He was on the Tigers’ staff as a wide receivers coach in 2008 as he watched the preseason favorite stumble to a 7-6 record.

That year there was no Tajh Boyd, the senior quarterback who is the 2013 ACC Player of the Year favorite, and there was perhaps no player with as much raw talent as wide receiver Sammy Watkins.

The current Tigers head coach said there are lessons to be taken away from that year, but that was a long time ago.

“A lot of water’s gone under the bridge since then,” Swinney said. “We’re a different program, different team and that’s the last thing I’m worried about, what happened in ’08.”

Clemson is a different animal than the one that took the field with lofty expectations in 2008. Former head coach Bobby Bowden was fired six games into the season, paving the way for the Swinney Era.

He took over as the interim head coach and finished the season 4-3. The Tigers have won at least nine games in three of his four full seasons as head coach as he, and the program, learned how to win.

That’s the big takeaway he addressed from that 2008 season. Swinney started off giving a sarcastic lesson.

“Don’t go 3-3,” he said, drawing laughs from the assembled media. “Win more.”

Then he went serious. He insisted that it’s been so long since that disappointing season that there isn’t much to learn, and then he told the media just what he did.

“Make sure we have great preparation, just stay true to what we believe in,” Swinney said. “We’re not going to do anything different than what we’ve done the last four years as far as how we prepare our football team and, again, I think the mentality has to be right. They expect to win and they believe in each other.

“That’s a whole different world from where we are now.”

Part of the change rests on Boyd’s shoulders. In 2008, the Tigers went into the year with Cullen Harper as their quarterback. He completed more than 60 percent of his passes for 2,601 yards – but threw more interceptions than touchdowns.

Boyd, a fifth-year senior, enters 2013 as a third-year starter, who has already guided Clemson to a conference championship in 2011 and a 25-24 Chick-fil-A Bowl win over Louisiana State in 2012. He’s considered a contender for the Heisman Trophy.

Boyd could have been a first-round pick in the 2013 NFL Draft had he left after his fourth year, but came back to receive the much-deserved plaudits of the conference’s media.

“He didn’t come back to Clemson to sit around and sing songs and make wedding proposals, I’ll tell you that,” Swinney said. “He came back to win.”

Swinney claimed the Bobby Dodd Coach of the Year award in 2011 when he led the Tigers to the ACC Championship with a first-year starting quarterback, but the media still favored Florida State, who was the second most popular pick in this year’s preseason poll.

This season will be the last for the “Dandy Dozen” recruiting class, as Swinney calls them, that were all recruited under the head coach’s watch and he credits with most of the program’s progress.

Some from that class, like defensive end Malliciah Goodman, are already gone, but much of it is still intact, and led by Boyd. In 2008, Boyd and 11 other freshmen took “a leap of faith” and joined the Tigers.

They already claimed one title. With the burden of expectation finally on them, the eight remaining seniors have a chance to take another — perhaps even at a higher level.

“You kind of change the culture through graduation and through recruiting,” Swinney said. “We’ve had high expectations every year. … We’re good enough, but we’ve got to have the right work ethic, right leadership, right chemistry, all those things. And that’s what we spend the majority of our time on.”

Published on July 22, 2013 at 3:59 pm

Contact David: dbwilson@syr.edu | @DBWilson2