Joel Klatt considers Dabo Swinney buyout, how it impacts future at Clemson

Fox Sports’ Joel Klatt considered Dabo Swinney’s buyout at Clemson and concluded he is not going anywhere anytime soon. With the large buyout, Swinney is at Clemson for the foreseeable future.

Granted, Swinney practically challenged the administration and/or fanbase to fire him because he’ll just go off and coach elsewhere. He’s not going to the beach after all!

Klatt examined the contract and also found out there’s no offset language. Basically, Clemson is stuck with Swinney, especially if they don’t want him anymore.

“Dabo’s buyout is $60 million, that’s not going anywhere,” Klatt said on his podcast. “There’s no offset language. If you know what offset language, it means that if he were to get fired and then take another job, whatever that next job paid him, it would offset the buyout, because the way that the buyout would probably work for them is that they would just pay him in installments annually for the life of the deal. 

“Now there’s also an option that they could pay him the entire $60 million within 90 days, which, like, why would you do that? Unless you had the lady that won Powerball in your state and wanted to do that, like she wanted to do at Alabama, but, like, there’s no way the school would choose to do that. So they would pay in installments over the life of the deal, which it ends in 2031 for Dabo.” 

There’s just too much money to pay Swinney for him to go away at this point. So Klatt concluded they’ll have to ride out 2025 and then try and examine their options.

“So they would be paying him, what is that? $11 million every year until 2031 to make him go away,” Klatt said. “And there’s no offset. So even if he went out and got another job, which he, by the way, said he would, if they let him go in that weird rant, he would not only make the money for that job, but the $11 million from Clemson. 

“That is egregiously bad that Clemson agreed to a deal with Dabo Swinney that had no offset language. What? That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Long story short, he’s not going anywhere. He’s really not.”

Clemson (1-3) is back in action on October 4th after a bye week. They’ll hit the road and play North Carolina (2-2).