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Dabo Swinney shares what he's learned about Bill Belichick before Clemson vs UNC football game
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- Dabo Swinney shares what he's learned about Bill Belichick before Clemson vs UNC football game
CLEMSON — Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney will face UNC coach Bill Belichick for the first time.
The Tigers (1-3, 0-2 ACC) will face the Tar Heels (2-2) on Oct. 4 (noon ET, ESPN) at Kenan Memorial Stadium in Chapel Hill, North Carolina . It will be the second time in college football history a coach with multiple FBS national championships will face one with multiple Super Bowl titles as a coach.
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"Are you kidding me? It's amazing," Swinney said Sept. 30. "(Never) in my lifetime I thought I would get an opportunity to coach against coach Belichick."
The last time a game like this happened was in 1993, when Bill Walsh, a three-time Super Bowl champion with the San Francisco 49ers , led Stanford against two-time national champion Joe Paterno and Penn State in the Blockbuster Bowl.
Belichick, 73, became North Carolina's football coach on Dec. 11, a season after parting ways with the NFL's New England Patriots . He has 333 wins, nine Super Bowl appearances and six Super Bowl wins during 29 seasons as an NFL head coach, but he had never coached at the collegiate level entering 2025.
Swinney, who won national championships in 2016 and 2018, had met Belichick a handful of times before UNC hired him: once when Swinney was an assistant at Alabama for a Pro Day and at a Clemson Pro Day in 2015.
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Since the Tar Heels hired Belichick, Swinney said he has talked to him more this year than ever. Both have been in offseason meetings, had a sitdown interview with ESPN during the offseason and spoke again during ACC Kickoff.
"He has a persona he's probably earned, but he's a nice guy," Swinney said. "He's smart. I told (Kathleen Swinney) that, in the meetings, I was so impressed with him. ... Passion doesn't know an age."
MORE: Five hard-to-believe Clemson football stats from Dabo Swinney's 1-3 start
A win in Week 6 would make Clemson 2-0 all-time against Super Bowl champion head coaches, including a 1-0 mark against Barry Switzer, and help the Tigers get out of last place in the ACC standings.
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"I wish him all the best except for this weekend," Swinney said. "We need a win a lot worse than he does."
Derrian Carter covers Clemson athletics for The Greenville News and the USA TODAY Network. Email him at dcarter@gannett.com and follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter, @DerrianCarter00
This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Clemson vs UNC, what Dabo Swinney said about facing Bill Belichick
