CLEMSON -- Before spring practice even started, we regularly shared how different this offseason felt from our grasp of things behind the scenes.

While publicly Dabo Swinney spent one early-February day railing on fans for becoming too entitled, privately he's been on the warpath after another three-loss season.

And it wasn't the three losses as much as the manner by which they were inflicted -- in some of the most excruciating and demoralizing ways possible.

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All three of those defeats suggested, in various ways, that this program had lost some of its edge. And so it follows that Swinney appears to have sharpened his edge as he enters Year 15 trying to remind everyone of what made Clemson elite to begin with.

He didn't let his firing of Brandon Streeter do all the talking, either. He spent time late last season saying he was going to hold people accountable for some of the failures of 2022, and that's been the vibe coming from the assistants during our recent visits with them.