Opinion: Dabo Swinney's stance on paying players can't be take seriously after new contract

In Dabo Swinney’s mind, the 10-year, $93 million contract he was awarded Friday to coach Clemson’s football team is undoubtedly the culmination of his own American Dream. 

From the virtual homelessness he experienced as a child in Alabama, to the unlikeliness of a “crawl-on” receiver becoming a meaningful player for a national championship team to a coaching career that has defied conventional wisdom at every turn, Swinney has spent his 49 years writing a story that would be difficult to believe if we didn’t know it were true. 

But now that Swinney sits on the mountaintop of his profession as the highest-paid coach in college football, it is difficult to feel good about his incredible success as long as he remains one of the loudest voices in a college athletics establishment that views sharing the wealth with the players who made it possible as some type of sacrilege.

Almost exactly five years ago, during the ultimately failed push for Northwestern football players to form a union, Swinney offered the following opinion to the Charleston Post & Courier: “We try to teach our guys, use football to create the opportunities, take advantage of the platform and the brand and the marketing you have available to you. But as far as paying players, professionalizing college athletics, that's where you lose me. I’ll go do something else, because there's enough entitlement in this world as it is.”

Swinney, as far as I know, has never disavowed that comment or indicated that his opinion has evolved on how to better compensate players aside from their current cost-of-living stipends. 

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But just as problematic is that word — entitlement — which indicates a worldview that doesn’t properly account for the very conditions that now allow Swinney to make $9 million a year. 

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Sorry Dabo, but this became professional sports a long time ago. College athletes at big-time football and basketball programs like Clemson aren’t dumb. They see the commercialism, the bloated ticket prices and the ever-growing coaching contracts and understand that their role in creating that enterprise is greater than the value of a scholarship. 

But entitlement? Give me a break. 

Entitlement is a coach going to his athletic director every year and expecting a raise, even though there’s no chance they're going to leave. Entitlement is a contract that would allow him to go to his alma mater - Alabama - for a relatively paltry $6 million at the high end. Entitlement is the ability to make a minimum of $93 million plus obtainable bonuses off the labor of 18-to-22 year olds, many of whom come from poor backgrounds just like Swinney, while standing publicly against the idea they should get a slice of the pie. 

Of course, Swinney can get away with this because he's got a great product to sell. Didn’t you see him at the NFL draft on Thursday night, yucking it up with Tim McGraw and cheering on three players who will soon sign their own life-changing contracts after getting picked in the first round?

They’ve got it all at Clemson now — the national championships, the facility that will take care of every players' needs from morning-to-midnight and the promise of millions of dollars coming at the end of that rainbow if you buy into the system and work hard. 

And the fact Swinney has lived that dream himself as a result of the opportunity college football offered him is even more of a reason to believe it. Swinney’s personal story is part of the package — from his single mother being a victim of domestic abuse and living in a tiny apartment with him in college all the way to executing his vision of turning Clemson into a national power even when he was an interim coach that nobody took seriously. 

And make no mistake, there's real value in all of it. What Swinney had to overcome and what his sheer determination and belief eventually built serves as an eternal inspiration for everyone in his orbit. 

But twisting his own Horatio Alger story into a defense of amateurism rules can no longer be taken seriously when Swinney is now the biggest beneficiary of a system that was never intended to be this awash in money.

Everyone understands the value of an elite coach in elevating the visibility of an entire university, and nobody begrudges Nick Saban or Mike Krzyzewski for the massive amounts of money they get paid. Swinney, after two national championships, is now firmly in that group.

But if anything, this would be a good time for him to acknowledge how out of whack the system has gotten and use the platform of this new contract to advocate for some big changes that would make things more equitable for the players that helped him become so rich. 

They deserve that from Clemson, and at more than $9 million a year, they deserve it from their coach. Because in the end, no matter what lessons or opportunities Swinney believes are imparted on his players through amateur athletics, not everyone is going to win at life the way he did. 

To deny fair compensation to those who helped make it possible — no matter how much or how little they take advantage of that opportunity — feels as wrong as ever when the coaches keep getting more, more, more. And only the entitled people in this business are those who continue to deny it.