Lane vs. Dabo, Mike Norvell vs. the hot seat and everything to watch in Week 1 - ESPN

Dabo Swinney rattled off the names of a half-dozen schools he had watched tape from to prepare for Clemson's season opener against a new-look LSU team with 40-some transfers on the roster. Oh, and he also spent some time scouting NFL camps, too.

«I got to watch practice with the Browns in early June,» he said. «I'm probably going to get turned in for tampering.»

Yes, Swinney's got jokes.

His best work, he prefaced with: «No pun intended,» before suggesting Clemson would bow out of the debate about Lane Kiffin's desire to utilize multiple players who have been in NFL camps by saying his Tigers would just «stay in our lane.»

Never mind that Swinney's pun game is always intentional. What a nation of frustrated fans heard from him was less a dad joke and more akin to the opening of a «CSI» episode.

«We're just going to stay ...» Swinney pops on sunglasses as the opening howl of «Won't Get Fooled Again» plays, "… in our Lane."

It took college football's most sacred tenets crumbling to dust this offseason, but here's the unassailable truth: Swinney's cool again, and in the battle of Tigers in the Bayou's Death Valley, Clemson is decidedly the good guy.

It wasn't that long ago that Clemson was college football's biggest power, a school that made the four-team playoff six straight seasons, won two national titles and played for two more, and Swinney, its outspoken coach a lightning rod for criticism as he lauded all he found great about the collegiate model — academics, amateurism, loyalty, playing for the love of the game. Swinney was decidedly out of touch with a world that saw so much inequity in that model.

Now, as the 2026 season begins, LSU is at the center of the sport after Kiffin abdicated his role with a playoff team,