Dabo Swinney walked into his first official team meeting in January, looked around the room and had a flashback to the same moment from the previous year.
Swinney had stepped forward to address players coming off a riveting national championship game to close out the 2016-17 season. Except many of those key players from the game were no longer there. Instead, Swinney saw six scholarship seniors and many young players looking back at him, took a deep breath and thought to himself, "We’ve got a lot of work to do."
The way Clemson grew up throughout the 2017-18 season is a big reason why the Tigers unexpectedly made it back to the College Football Playoff despite losing Deshaun Watson, Ben Boulware and many others.