CLEMSON, S.C. — On the day that Dan Radakovich started to put together a visual presentation for Clemson’s Board of Trustees that would illustrate why he believed Dabo Swinney was worthy of the largest known contract in college football, the Clemson athletic director took his place in his office and made his way to the left-hand side of the room.
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Graham Neff, Clemson’s deputy director of athletics, was there alongside him, as were as a few other prominent figures in the department, including Clemson legal adviser Chip Hood.
Staring back at them on this day in early April was a blank whiteboard.
This would be the vessel, Radakovich told The Athletic on Friday morning, where “The Swinney Effect” was born.
It was the starting point for a slide show he would present to Clemson’s board, painting a picture to illustrate the value the 49-year-old Swinney brings to the university and why it is important Swinney be compensated generously.
On Friday morning, “The Swinney Effect”, now fully developed and in PDF form, made its debut on a projector screen as Radakovich presented it to the board for the first time and Swinney got his deal.
The Clemson coach was granted a 10-year, $93 million contract Friday morning by Clemson’s Board of Trustees, as they sat in the Madren Conference Center wowed by what they saw on the screen.
To explain how and to understand why Swinney was given college football’s largest deal this offseason is to understand “The Swinney Effect” presentation.
And Radakovich is happy to explain.
“I think he’s a generational coach,” Radakovich said Friday, once the deal was done.
“And there’s no coach better for Clemson than Dabo Swinney.”
The presentation, as shown on a large projector the board here Friday, is broken into four parts as they relate to the head coach and his impact at the school.
Part 1: Value
Part 2: Affordability
Part 3: Market
Part 4: Contract Details
All four parts played an important role in why the administration decided on the 10-year term and why it decided on $93 million. These were not arbitrary numbers, they were driven by a method.
Part 1, the value portion of the presentation, spoke to the ways in which Swinney’s name has increased the value of Clemson’s brand, both from an athletic standpoint and a university one.
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At the guidance of Board of Trustees chairman Smyth McKissick, Radakovich decided the data he compiled in this Part 1 would start from the year 2005 and end in the year 2018, with the intent to accurately and emphatically show how Swinney’s name has continued to grow in the past 13 years.
In 2005, the first data point, Swinney would have been a young assistant as the wide receivers coach under Tommy Bowden. In 2010, the second data point, Swinney would have been in his second full season as the head coach, having taken over from Bowden midway through 2008 as the interim and then made full-time by then-athletic director Terry Don Phillips. In 2015, the third data point, Swinney would have been leading the Tigers to the first of what has now been four consecutive College Football Playoff appearances, and in 2018, the fourth and most recent data point, he would have been coming off his second national championship in three years, a scene that saw him both hoist the trophy and receive a wet-willy from former defensive tackle Christian Wilkins on the same night.
As the charts show, in 2005, 52,508 season tickets were sold.
That number dipped to 47,826 in 2010, Swinney’s second season as he looked for his footing, but by 2015, season ticket sales were back up to 55,253 and by 2018, the university had sold 61,523 season tickets.
Season ticket revenue rose from $12,010,706 in 2005 to $24,856,087 in 2018, more than doubling in 13 years. And as Swinney continued to win, the price of a season ticket rose from $225 in 2005 to $395 in 2018.
“Dabo’s effect on this institution has been incredible,” Clemson president Jim Clements said. “Increase in fundraising, increase in applications, national visibility, culture … I’m thankful he wants to be with us.”
In terms of IPTAY, the university’s donor program, the annual fund revenue rose from $12,660,093 in 2005 to $35,978,000 in 2018. Licensing revenue grew tenfold from $1,356,704 in 2005 to $13,616,788 in 2018, and athletic department revenue more than tripled from $39,100,505 in 2005 to $121,713,929 in 2018.
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Last in the “Value” section of “The Swinney Effect” were the number of social media followers Clemson football helped generate for the athletic department’s social brand and the number of undergraduate applicants to the school since Swinney took the helm.
Clemson’s athletics social media accounts had an estimated 100,000 followers in 2010 between Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. That number is now up to 2,934,873 with the Clemson football Twitter account having about 922,000 of those followers itself.
In 2005, some 12,463 students applied to Clemson. In 2018, 28,845 applied, with 21,430 of them coming from out of state.
“We don’t claim this piece right here (with applications), but we thought it was very interesting,” Radakovich said. “You can see that there is some correlation. This graph looks a lot like all of the other graphs that you saw.”
The positive trend across the Y axis couldn’t be missed.
Parts 2 and 3 of “The Swinney Effect,” the “Affordability” and “Market” sections, addressed projected revenues and expenditures and the contracts of other football coaches of Swinney’s caliber.
As Radakovich continued to walk the Board of Trustees through the slideshow, he next sought to help the board understand why it could afford to pay Swinney the $93 million over 10 years by showing some projected numbers for the future.
He pulled up the respective projected revenues from IPTAY and the athletic department between the 2019 and 2023 fiscal years. Then he pointed out the projected expenses the department would incur over that time.
For all five fiscal years, Clemson expects to be in surplus. In other words, the university fully expects that the revenue IPTAY and the athletic department bring in between now and 2023 will combine to outweigh the money leaving in the form of expenses every year.
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According to Radakovich’s data, the athletic department is expecting a $1.74 million surplus in fiscal year 2019, followed by surpluses of $1.8 million, $1.88 million, $1.3 million and $2.46 million in the years to follow.
When it came time to examine where Swinney fits in the coaching market, Radakovich chose four coaches for comparisons: Alabama coach Nick Saban, former Ohio State coach Urban Meyer, Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh and Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher.
“We kept Coach Meyer in there as a historical data point because of his success,” Radakovich said. “He had won three national championships, Coach Saban has six, Coach Fisher has one. This is the neighborhood where Coach Swinney lives right now as it relates to his compensation.”
Swinney’s $93 million gives him the largest total value dollar amount of any of them. His average of $9.3 million a year is just shy of Saban’s $9.44 million a year, but Swinney has a $50 million guarantee compared to the $33.6 million guarantee in Saban’s current contract.
Part 4 of “The Swinney Effect” rewards Swinney for what he has done for the university, and it is the part that makes an emphatic statement from university to coach:
“The whole goal of this was to create a long-term commitment between Clemson and Coach Swinney,” Radakovich said. “You do the math, and the numbers get into what they are, but it was really about showing commitment.
“Solidarity on both sides.”
The obvious question with Swinney’s contract rests with his buyout and its language.
The contract includes a clause that will require Swinney to pay a fee in addition to the typical one he would owe for leaving Clemson for another head coaching job if that head coaching job is at Alabama, his alma mater.
If Swinney were to leave Clemson for a head coaching job any time between now and Dec. 31, 2020, he owes the university $4 million. But if he were to leave for Alabama, he would owe $6 million.
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The only instance in which he would owe the university nothing for leaving for Alabama would be if he took the job after Dec. 31, 2028.
Why the clause?
“That’s because of all you guys,” Radakovich cracked to the media. “Everybody thinks that Dabo is going to move on to Alabama, and while we were looking at these things, it really wasn’t that difficult as it related to that with his representative. We were going to have a buyout for all other schools.
“For that one, we just kind of put in an additional little kicker.”
The new contract reiterates to Swinney that he is valued, appreciated and wanted, and it does everything it can to retain him.
The latter doesn’t seem like it should be an issue any time soon.
“The magnitude and significance of the financial commitment Clemson has made isn’t lost on me, and to be honest, it is all indescribably humbling,” Swinney wrote in an open letter to fans.
“Last season, our team put together a historic season that we’ve called the ‘Best Ever,’ but as I recently told our 2019 team, the 2018 squad was the best ever … so far. I am proud of our program, what we represent and what we have accomplished, and I am even prouder to say that — now more than ever — the best is yet to come. This last decade has been an absolute blast, and I can’t wait to see what’s in store in the decade to come.”
(Top photo: Matthew Emmons / USA TODAY Sports)
