Two football coaching legends will face off on October 4 when two-time national champion Dabo Swinney’s Clemson Tigers travel to Chapel Hill to take on eight-time Super Bowl winner Bill Belichick’s North Carolina Tar Heels. The two coaches recently sat down for a side-by-side interview with ESPN’s Rece Davis, and, naturally, the upcoming matchup in the fall came up as a topic of discussion.
Despite this being his first experience facing off against Belichick, Swinney joked that he has the “secret sauce” to defeat the Tar Heels coach.
“We went and got our own Patriot,” Swinney said. “I think he’s got three Super Bowl championships—Ryan Allen, who was a punter for you [Belichick] so he’s our specialist coach, and my secret sauce to finding a way to beat the Patriots in October whenever we play.”
Allen, who is in his second season as Clemson’s special teams development/specialists coach, indeed spent the first six seasons of his NFL career playing for Belichick on the New England Patriots, as Belichick reminisced about alongside Swinney.
Swinney, tongue-in-cheek, plans to use Allen’s insight into Belichick’s special teams strategy against him in the fall.
“We’re going to lean on him [Allen] heavy to figure out how to defeat y’all’s punt block team or whatever else,” Swinney said.
The Clemson coach, whose team travels to Boston College to take on the Eagles the week after facing North Carolina, also quipped that he’ll be facing the brain trust of the dynastic Patriots, seeing as longtime former Patriots assistant coach Bill O’Brien is Boston College’s head football coach.
“We play the New England Patriots this year,” Swinney said. “We go to North Carolina, and then we go to Boston College to play [former Patriots offensive coordinator] Bill O’Brien. So, I feel like I’m playing the whole Patriots organization in about a two-week span there.”
The October showdown between Clemson and North Carolina figures to be fun, if only because of the chess match between these two coaches. If the Tigers manage to win the special teams battle, you now know who to credit for the game planning.
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