Baptisms at practice: How college football became a Christian empire

When a reporter asked Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney to discuss his faith in July 2018, Swinney chuckled and said that it was the easiest question of the day. Over two minutes, Swinney invoked Jeremiah 29:11 (“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future”) and stressed that when he meets his maker one day, he “won’t pat me on the back and tell me how many wins I had”.

“We can pass the bucket if y’all want and keep going!” Swinney said after finishing his remarks.

Of Swinney’s many memorable interviews during his 12 years in charge of Clemson, the 2018 sermon was the ideal encapsulation of his public persona: eloquent, charismatic and focused on the importance of Christian faith in daily life. Before Swinney assumed the program in 2008, Clemson was a middling college football team with a limited national profile. Over the last four years, the Tigers have won two national titles and are currently ranked No 1 in the AP rankings.

Think of Clemson like Manchester City – a once middling team now an established elite – if Pep Guardiola invoked Catholicism as a tactic to lure the world’s top young players. Through masterful recruiting, savvy hiring and major financial investment in facilities, Swinney constructed an empire at a South Carolina public university that is located more than 100 miles from any major American airport.

Swinney doesn’t shy from emphasizing how his Christian faith guides his life and his work. That publicity has inspired a fandom from American Christians beyond the Clemson fan base and drawn the ire of watchdog groups that find his methods to be violations of the First Amendment.

In 2014, the Wisconsin-based non-profit Freedom From Religious Foundation (FFRF) submitted a letter of complaint to Clemson voicing “constitutional concerns about how the public university’s football program is entangled with religion” and citing Swinney as a chief violator of separation of church and state. The most visible example was when Swinney invited a local Baptist preacher named Perry Noble to perform baptisms of wide receivers Deandre Hopkins and Sammy Watkins at practices in 2012. Noble’s involvement with the team was part of FFRF’s 35-page report detailing the perceived proselytizing of Christian coaches and team chaplains at Clemson and several other major college football programs.

“I think coaches should use anything that is positive and inclusive to support the team” says Texas Southern professor Dr Yoruba T Mutakabbir, who co-authored Religious Minority Students in Higher Education, part of which studies how Christianity is embedded with college football in the American south. “The problem is when it is exclusive to one religion.”

Swinney did not invent Christianity as a tool to recruit talented high school players to join his program, he’s just the most successful at deploying it. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, head coach Bill McCartney transformed a dormant football program at the University of Colorado into one of the nation’s elite teams. While coaching the team in 1990, he founded Promise Keepers, an Evangelical organization that describes itself as “a Christ-centered organization dedicated to introducing men to Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord, helping them to grow as Christians”. Where some academics and nontheists see brazen constitutional violations from coaches who profess their faith as a way to help grow young college students, those involved with college football see a savvy strategy in the ruthless game of recruiting teenagers.

Every year, a college program has a set number of scholarships vacated by players who either graduated or left the team. Those scholarships are then awarded to high school or junior college players who choose to attend the university. To secure a commitment from a top player, a coach must convince a player and his family that he will compete for playing time, receive a college degree and be supervised by a responsible coaching staff. When a coach can cite his faith as a guiding principle to a religious family, it’s often the parents who are convinced even more than the player himself.

“When you recruit in the [American] south, a coach can use Christianity as a weapon,” says Tom Lemming, the lead college football recruiting analyst at CBS Sports Network. “They proclaim a lot of faith to kids and parents and it’s the parents who fall in line.”

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Those who work in college football will tell you that recruiting battles are often more competitive than the games themselves. University of Alabama head coach Nick Saban once said of the national championship – the sport’s pinnacle contest – “That damn game cost me a week of recruiting.” And where there is high-stakes competition, there is corruption that can undermine the Christian faith that so many coaches profess.

Former University of Mississippi head coach Hugh Freeze was arguably the most public advocate of his Christian faith, even more so than Swinney. “I use either myself or our coaches or our team as examples and I think examples are great way of teaching,” Freeze once told the Jason Romano Sports Spectrum podcast, “Jesus taught that way. So we work hard at teaching them a character trait class every year.”

Freeze was eventually forced to resign from his position after the school discovered he made phone calls from a university phone to an escort service. The calls were part of a pattern of violations – cash transfers and academic impropriety among them – committed under Freeze’s watch that led to sanctions on the school’s football program. Just 17 months after his ouster at Mississippi, Freeze was hired to coach at Liberty University in Virginia, the Evangelical university started by famed Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell. In his opening press conference, Freeze claimed that “Jesus Christ, he is the only one I’ve ever met who can handle my junk.”

“This is why so many coaches use Christianity as a weapon,” Lemming says. “Some know that coaches can get caught cheating and God is going to forgive them. It’s a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

Coaches like to invoke Christianity as a way to bridge race, socioeconomics and class among 100-plus young men. The American south is the most renowned recruiting battlefield, and Lemming indicates that Evangelical Christianity can work equally well recruiting black players and white players. Recently, the highest impact of recruiting by Christianity has involved players of Samoan, Tongan and Polynesian descent. Dr Adam Beissel, who wrote an essay title Confessions of a Human Trafficker, spent over a year in American Samoa as part of his dissertation research to study how so many players have left the islands to be successful football players.

“The adage in American Samoa is the triangulation between faith, family and football,” Beissel says. “It’s quite common for recruiters to play on that intersectionality. Faith operates as a sort of currency to get off the island. Many programs will send an assistant coach of Samoan, or Tongan descent who will tell the kid and his family that they have somebody to share their Christian faith once they get to the mainland.”

Those recruits used to attend universities primarily in the western United States – those of Mormon faith often attended Brigham Young or Utah, others would sign to play at programs closer to the islands like Washington, USC and Oregon. Now, some prep players of Pacific Island descent are rated higher than they ever have before. And southern schools, not western ones, are winning those recruiting battles.

Alabama quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, who is expected to be a top selection in the 2020 NFL draft, elected to attend college over 4,300 miles from his hometown of Honolulu, Hawaii because the school “first and foremost, it was their belief in God”. The top quarterback prospect in the Class of 2020, DJ Uiagaleilei attends high school in Bellflower, California, but is set to join Swinney at Clemson – more than 2,300 miles away from home – because “I can just feel the presence of God up there”.

Clemson have handily won their first three games of the season, and Swinney appears primed to compete for another national title. Critics have accused him of some rather un-Christian hypocrisy – he refused to give former starting quarterback Kelly Bryant a national championship ring after Bryant elected to transfer schools and has openly campaigned against players receiving wages despite signing a 10-year, $93m contract this past April. Unlike Freeze, Swinney has not faced any scandal and, according to Lemming, is compiling one of the best recruiting classes in history this year.

Swinney has demonstrated his skills as a coach. And in the unique world of American college football, being a man of Christian faith can help build a powerhouse.