Clemson coach Dabo Swinney takes a jab at Duke football’s locker room setup
Next Monday’s Clemson-Duke game was already shaping up as one of the more entertaining matchups on the Week 1 college football slate.
Now, Clemson coach Dabo Swinney has added a little extra fuel to the fire by critiquing what he described as the two- to three-minute “journey” opposing teams must take to get to the visitors’ locker room at Duke’s Wallace Wade Stadium.
In comments that made the rounds on social media Monday, Swinney said he didn’t like the setup because it cuts into the amount of time visiting coaches have to make adjustments and address their team during college football’s 20-minute halftime.
Swinney brought up his dislike for Duke’s visitors locker room location unprompted while previewing his team’s trip to Durham on the first 2023 edition of “Tiger Calls”, the weekly call-in radio show he does on Mondays throughout the season with Clemson broadcaster Don Munson.
The No. 9 Tigers haven’t played at Duke since 2012.
“The other unique thing about (the stadium) that I do not like, and nobody likes that plays at Duke, is you have to — I mean, it’s like a two- or three-minute walk,” Swinney said. “It’s a long way to get to the locker room. A long way. And in college football, you barely have enough time to go to the bathroom and talk for 30 seconds in there and it’s time to go again.”
Swinney, entering his 15th full season as Clemson’s coach, said he was “excited” to check out upgrades to Wallace Wade Stadium since the last time his team played there a decade ago.
Duke recently completed a multi-phase, $100 million renovation to its stadium in 2017 that included removing the running track that surrounded the playing field after the 2014 season, adding various premium seating and luxury suites and improving operations facilities.
“Everybody has talked about how nice it is and what a great job they’ve done with the improvements,” Swinney said. “But I did ask about the locker room journey and that is, unfortunately, I think, still the case.”
“It’s still there,” Munson said. “It is still there.”
“So we’ll have to walk briskly,” Swinney said.
Exchanging playful jabs
As far as ACC stadiums go, Duke’s Wallace Wade Stadium does have a unique locker room setup in that visiting teams have to temporarily exit the facility to get to their locker rooms.
While the Blue Devils have a direct tunnel from the stadium to their home locker rooms in the adjacent Yoh Football Center, visiting teams must leave the stadium and walk another roughly 400 feet across an adjacent practice field to reach their locker rooms in the standalone Brooks Football Building.
One year, according to the News & Observer, Pittsburgh players and coaches walked through the practice field to get to the visitors’ locker room. Duke has since put up ropes to keep people from walking over that grass.
Swinney has visited Duke once as a Clemson head coach (2012) and twice as a Clemson assistant (2004, 2007). His jab irked a number of Duke fans and fans of other schools, many of whom chimed in on X (formerly Twitter) to make their own jabs and remind Swinney that Clemson has its own gameday quirks.
“Doesn’t this team literally take buses around to the other side of their stadium pregame?”
“This guy voluntarily runs down a mountain every home game. He will be fine.”
“This journey includes walking across one practice field area.”
Clemson is a 13-point betting favorite for next Monday’s game at Duke, which pits the ACC’s current standard-bearer against one of its up-and-coming programs. The Tigers went 11-3 in 2022, won their seventh conference championship in the past eight seasons and appeared in the Orange Bowl, losing to Tennessee.
Duke last season was widely assumed to be one of the worst teams in the ACC but made a remarkable turnaround under former Texas A&M defensive coordinator Mike Elko, who won ACC Coach of the Year honors in his first year by guiding the Blue Devils to a 9-4 record and Military Bowl win.
It’s the season opener and conference opener for both teams and marks the second straight season Clemson has started its season on Labor Day. Last year, the Tigers beat Georgia Tech 41-10 in Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
Months before Swinney’s locker room critique, the Duke football team took its own playful jab at Clemson. On Jan. 30, the night of the ACC schedule release show, the Blue Devils posted a video parodying the Tigers’ traditional run down The Hill at Memorial Stadium ahead of home games.
In the clip, a Duke player touches a Duke version of Howard’s Rock, another Clemson pregame staple, and takes an extended run through a tunnel at Wallace Wade Stadium and onto the field — just like Swinney often does while leading Clemson’s team down The Hill (often in viral fashion).
The video, posted on X, was captioned “MONDAY, September 4th we’re sprinting into week 1” and generated 1.1 million views. Elko, appearing a week later on ACC Network, said “obviously we’re not looking to disrespect anyone, and we’ve got a tremendous amount of respect for Howard’s Rock and everything that Clemson does.”
“But I think when we got here, we felt like we had to re-engage our fan base and we had to try to create a buzz around what we were doing with this program, and nowadays all of that stuff happens on social media,” Elko said, per The Clemson Insider. “So we went out and hired a team and we try to let them get out and try to be creative and try to do some things that will catch people’s eye, and I think they’ve done a great job kind of growing that part of our program.”
CLEMSON VS. DUKE GAME, TV INFO
Who: Clemson (0-0, 0-0 ACC) vs. Duke (0-0, 0-0 ACC)
Where: Wallace Wade Stadium, Durham, N.C.
When: 8 p.m. Monday, Sept. 4
TV: ESPN
Line: Clemson by 13 points
This story was originally published August 29, 2023 at 10:24 AM with the headline "Clemson coach Dabo Swinney takes a jab at Duke football’s locker room setup."
