https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/dabo-s...52760.html

Clemson is best known as an ACC powerhouse. So whenever Dabo Swinney talked about the Tigers as an underdog program, people didn’t really believe him. But many ACC schools, including Clemson, are now under serious financial pressure. That reality is making the head coach’s earlier warnings much harder to ignore.

For almost a decade, Clemson lived in the national spotlight, beating brands like Ohio State and Notre Dame in big games. That success made Swinney’s “little ol’ Clemson” talk sound like a joke. Few people thought he was actually warning about money and what it takes to keep winning at that level.

According to reports, Clemson’s debt has now climbed past $1.15 billion, with total long‑term liabilities about $2.65 billion, and local coverage and social chatter rounding the overall burden to roughly $1.5 billion. It comes at the same time Dabo Swinney has been openly complaining about the unchecked spending race happening across college football. On Greg McElroy’s podcast, he pushed back against the idea that the Tigers belong in the same financial class as the sport’s biggest spenders.

Overblown, or big deal?

Also from the article -
Syracuse is cutting 93 academic programs
UNC-Chapel Hill is cutting $89 Million over three years
Duke - launching $350 million budget reduction

Institutional debt is not athletic department debt. I'm not sure how much this impacts the athletic programs beyond some cannibalism of some donor money.

A school like Washington State with falling enrollment and rapidly growing institutional debts is more serious as they subsidize athletics unlike Clemson.

Incredibly misleading article by mixing in non-athletic debt and budgets with athletic recurring expenses.

Even if you cut athlete NIL to $0, the exact same problems would exist with non-athletic debt and budgets because of forces totally outside of athletics - drastic reductions in full tuition paying international students, the enrollment cliff domestically, certain majors not having requisite demand, large federal funding cuts to spending programs. Absolutely terrible and misleading analysis in the OP-linked opinion piece. (It is not a report.)

(05-18-2026 02:45 PM)dbackjon Wrote:  Overblown, or big deal?

Obviously a $1.5 Billion dollar deficit doesn't grow solely out of the athletic department.

Clemson is a public university (the NC State of South Carolina) and the state of South Carolina will have to address the problem. If this is long term, I would imagine the President will have a lot of explaining to do to who ever oversees the University System in South Carolina.

(05-18-2026 02:57 PM)XLance Wrote:  

(05-18-2026 02:45 PM)dbackjon Wrote:  Overblown, or big deal?

Obviously a $1.5 Billion dollar deficit doesn't grow solely out of the athletic department.

Clemson is a public university (the NC State of South Carolina) and the state of South Carolina will have to address the problem. If this is long term, I would imagine the President will have a lot of explaining to do to who ever oversees the University System in South Carolina.

Um, they're more like the Michigan or UNC of South Carolina. Clemson is FAR better in football, they have a greater endowment, they are more academically prestigious...need I go on? Or are you claiming that NC St is more academically prestigious and a "better" school overall than UNC? Interesting claim for a lifelong Tar Heel, but I'll roll with it.

Author of the article has 17 twitter followers. I'm not sure that she has a firm-enough grasp of mathematics to understand that schools like Clemson can borrow money. Tying institutional debt to Athletics is ridiculous. Now, if someone were to say that perhaps Dabo doesn't have the same NIL budget as SMU, and the only reason he beat them in 2024 is that he's a great coach and SMU's coach is a scrub...ok, I'd buy that one. Dabo was able to outspend a whole lot of schools for a decade back before it was allowed, but now that it's kosher to do so and he can't outspend everybody, he all of a sudden has a conscience? Yeah, I could get behind an article like that. But not a worthless article like the one the OP linked.

https://www.essentiallysports.com/author/khosalu-puro/
https://x.com/KhosaluP

(05-18-2026 02:52 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  Incredibly misleading article by mixing in non-athletic debt and budgets with athletic recurring expenses.

Even if you cut athlete NIL to $0, the exact same problems would exist with non-athletic debt and budgets because of forces totally outside of athletics - drastic reductions in full tuition paying international students, the enrollment cliff domestically, certain majors not having requisite demand, large federal funding cuts to spending programs. Absolutely terrible and misleading analysis in the OP-linked opinion piece. (It is not a report.)

It’s happened a few times before (particularly with some SI articles linked on this board), but this author is actually just a college student in India. In previous instances, the India author was clearly using AI to generate slop, although I’m not sure whether AI was utilized here. Whatever the case, this is not someone who even lives on this side of the world.
https://in.linkedin.com/in/khosalu-puro-688047184

(05-18-2026 08:17 PM)bryanw1995 Wrote:  

(05-18-2026 02:57 PM)XLance Wrote:  

(05-18-2026 02:45 PM)dbackjon Wrote:  Overblown, or big deal?

Obviously a $1.5 Billion dollar deficit doesn't grow solely out of the athletic department.

Clemson is a public university (the NC State of South Carolina) and the state of South Carolina will have to address the problem. If this is long term, I would imagine the President will have a lot of explaining to do to who ever oversees the University System in South Carolina.

Um, they're more like the Michigan or UNC of South Carolina. Clemson is FAR better in football, they have a greater endowment, they are more academically prestigious...need I go on? Or are you claiming that NC St is more academically prestigious and a "better" school overall than UNC? Interesting claim for a lifelong Tar Heel, but I'll roll with it.

Author of the article has 17 twitter followers. I'm not sure that she has a firm-enough grasp of mathematics to understand that schools like Clemson can borrow money. Tying institutional debt to Athletics is ridiculous. Now, if someone were to say that perhaps Dabo doesn't have the same NIL budget as SMU, and the only reason he beat them in 2024 is that he's a great coach and SMU's coach is a scrub...ok, I'd buy that one. Dabo was able to outspend a whole lot of schools for a decade back before it was allowed, but now that it's kosher to do so and he can't outspend everybody, he all of a sudden has a conscience? Yeah, I could get behind an article like that. But not a worthless article like the one the OP linked.

https://www.essentiallysports.com/author/khosalu-puro/
https://x.com/KhosaluP

??? That is the same article from the same author in the list you linked. Was that intended?

XLance is correct on the Clemson identity analogy.

The 1.5 billion reference is bizarre.

This speaks to the Clemson matter:

https://scdailygazette.com/2026/05/05/sc...ent-cliff/

The public university that is in South Carolina with immense financial issues, is South Carolina State University, a HBC.

https://www.thestate.com/news/local/educ...31782.html

https://www.wistv.com/2026/05/05/foundat...r-funding/