By STEVE REED AP Sports Writer
The coaching clash between Bill Belichick and Dabo Swinney may have lost its luster with North Carolina and Clemson off to disappointing starts, but don’t tell Swinney that.
Swinney said he’s embracing the opportunity to coach against Belichick on Saturday when his Tigers face the Tar Heels in Chapel Hill.
“Yeah, I mean, are you kidding me? It’s amazing,” Swinney said Tuesday. “I mean, I never in my lifetime thought I would get an opportunity to coach against coach Belichick. I mean, how cool is that?”
It marks only the second time in college football history that a coach with multiple national championships will face one with multiple Super Bowl titles. Bill Walsh, a three-time Super Bowl winner with the San Francisco 49ers, led Stanford against two-time champion Joe Paterno and Penn State in the Blockbuster Bowl on Jan. 1, 1993.
The spectacle of Belichick’s arrival at the college level has commanded a national spotlight.
UNC’s hiring of the six-time Super Bowl-winning head coach (he won two others as an assistant) looked to be an all-in bet to upgrade the program — which included paying Belichick at least $10 million in each of his first three seasons — and reset the balance of the Atlantic Coast Conference. Swinney’s Tigers have long dominated the league, winning eight of the last 10 titles.
Excitement grew over the Oct. 4 matchup as the season approached and it figured to be one of the marquee games on the college football schedule.
But North Carolina’s opener turned into a debacle, with TCU running a sold-out crowd out of Kenan Stadium by the end of the third quarter in a 48-14 blowout. UNC’s two wins came against Charlotte and Richmond before the Tar Heels lost to another Big 12 team — UCF — by a 34-9 score.
Clemson has been an even bigger disappointment.
The Tigers entered the season ranked No. 4 in the AP poll, the overwhelming favorite to repeat as ACC champions and expected to compete for a third national title under Swinney after returning the most experienced team in the country.
But first-team preseason All-American Cade Klubnik and company stumbled out of the blocks, losing at home to then-No. 9 LSU. Little has gone right since.
The Tigers needed a second-half comeback to beat Troy, and then dropped back-to-back games to Georgia Tech and Syracuse to fall to 0-2 in the league. The Tigers had entered the game against the Orange as a 17 1/2-point favorite at home, but fell behind 10-0 early and lost 34-21.
Clemson’s 1-3 start is its worst in the Swinney era, and the Tigers spent the bye this past weekend soul-searching, self-evaluating and resetting their season-long goals with their national championship hopes vanquished.
“It has been a coaching failure,” Swinney said. “We have failed as coaches. … I’m not pointing the finger, I’m pointing the thumb.”
With both teams struggling, the ACC scheduled the game for a noon EDT kickoff — not the prime-time matchup that many had anticipated. Rapper Ludacris was booked to perform before the game on the Chapel Hill campus, a concert that is now set to start at 9:40 a.m.
Swinney said it’s time for the Tigers, two-touchdown favorites, to “see what we’re made of.”
Belichick and Swinney had crossed paths before Belichick’s arrival at UNC, though they got to know each other more in the ACC coaches’ meetings during the offseason. At the time, Swinney joked that seeing Belichick at the meetings was “so 2025.”
Belichick said he began picking Swinney’s brain in an effort to garner insights from his long run of coaching at the college level.
“Dabo spoke a number of times about various issues, and I can just tell from his comments and his opinions on certain things where he was coming from, what his beliefs are, what’s important to him and what his convictions are,” Belichick said. “And those were all pretty consistent with what I thought they would be.
“But to actually hear him articulate them and talk about things that he deals with as the head coach at that school — that in all honesty, I haven’t had enough experience at this level to appreciate all those — was very insightful for me. We talked about some things outside of the meetings, off-camera and things like that. But he’s been very, I would say, helpful with a couple of things that I’ve asked him about just in general. And I appreciate his openness and willingness to try to give me some advice that I’ve asked for.”
Swinney said he was more than happy to help.
“The guy’s got eight (Super Bowl) rings,” Swinney said. “He’s arguably the greatest (coach) ever, certainly at the pro level. It’s a cool thing.”
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AP Sports Writer Aaron Beard in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, contributed to this report.