Dabo Swinney on NFL players returning to college: "It's embarrassing"

A team of players representing Clemson University will play a team of players representing Louisiana State University on Saturday night in Baton Rouge. We have a pretty good idea of who's going to play for Clemson -- Clemson students, who've practiced with the  Tigers for months. For LSU? Not so much.

LSU's attempt to sue NFL wannabes onto their roster continued as of Tuesday morning, with a Thursday morning court hearing and an on-paper roster deadline of Friday looming as the next official hurdles. 

It's kind of perfect that LSU opens the Lane Kiffin Era against Clemson. Saturday Night in Death Valley pits the ultimate win-at-any-cost coach against the coach most openly pining for the old way of doing things (at least now that Mike Gundy is no longer coaching). The coach most likely to push the envelope in terms of roster building, if we want to call it that, against the least. And for the first time in close to a decade, Dabo Swinney gets to play the underdog. 

And Dabo makes a great underdog.

"It's kind of embarrassing," Swinney said Tuesday. "Honestly, it's embarrassing that's where we are. I don't blame the kids, but people trying to take advantage of the system. I just think it's embarrassing where we are with college football, but we've been there for a while.

"I just keep my energy and my focus on the things that I control and the things that matter, and that's our team. All this outside stuff, we just try to -- no pun intended -- stay in our lane here at Clemson."

Swinney joked that he took in a Cleveland Browns practice over the summer, which means he's now liable to be turned in for tampering.

"We have no rules. There's no governance. It's a joke," Swinney said. "There's zero rules, and when you enforce rules, somebody just goes to find a judge to say, 'No, you can't enforce that rule.'"

Unranked Clemson is a 10.5-point underdog at LSU, but for content purposes all neutral parties should be rooting for the purple-and-orange Tigers over the purple-and-yellow. If Clemson pulls the upset and spoils the debut of the Lane Kiffin era in front of a national primetime audience on a Saturday night in Death Valley? Brother, that postgame press conference is going to be loud.