CLEMSON -- On Jan. 10, Graham Neff was with Clemson's basketball team on its trip to Blacksburg.
He ended up not watching much basketball that night.
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Late that afternoon, the greatest of all time announced his retirement.
And it was Neff's job to make sure Clemson was in no danger of losing its own GOAT.
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As it turned out, the conversation between Dabo Swinney and Alabama didn't end up getting very far in part because of Swinney's realization that Clemson is where he's supposed to be.
But if you're in the AD's chair during some of those anxious and uncertain moments, you don't just sit there and rely on faith alone that your guy is going to remain at his post.
Every AD has his just-in-case list, and Neff is surely no different.
But haven't recent openings and searches elsewhere shown us that the market isn't exactly overflowing with supposed slam-dunk candidates?
Texas A&M spent more than $70 million to rid itself of Jimbo Fisher, and it could well turn out that Mike Elko is the right guy. But grabbing a second-year head coach from Duke isn't exactly a splash.
Had Kalen DeBoer decided that life was good enough in Seattle, where would Alabama have turned? Not to Mike Norvell or Dan Lanning, both of whom had recommitted themselves to their current schools. Nor Steve Sarkisan, who'd done the same at Texas. And Swinney had taken himself off the table too.
Bottom line, the list of obvious top-shelf candidates seems much shorter than it used to be.
Consider, for a moment, how much in college football has changed since late November of 2021 when Brent Venables made his final act at Clemson a 30-0 suffocation of South Carolina in Columbia:
Brian Kelly would soon leave Notre Dame in the middle of the night for LSU.
Lincoln Riley would soon leave Oklahoma in the middle of the night for USC.
If some of us spend a lot of time gnashing our teeth over the lack of loyalty by players, surely we can also acknowledge that some of the supposed adults in the room aren't setting the best examples.
Now here we are and three national championship coaches (Saban, Fisher, Jim Harbaugh) are out of the game.
And when we look back to the past 15 national champions, we remember a few other names that are no longer even on our radars: Ed Orgeron (2019), Urban Meyer (2014), Gene Chizik (2010).
Take a look at the current head-coaching luminaries and try to find how many are basically untouchable.
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That list numbers two, and it's the two coaches who will open the season Aug. 31 in Atlanta.
Beyond Swinney and Kirby Smart, Ryan Day's 56-8 record suggests he's in zero danger of losing his job at Ohio State.
But three straight losses to Michigan -- and the indignity of watching the Wolverines celebrate a national title last month -- strongly suggest otherwise.
This is not to say the head-coaching ranks are full of duds.
But even with Clemson's decline over the past three seasons, even with fair questions about how Swinney will navigate NIL and the transfer portal with the amateurism toothpaste not just out of the tube but out of the bathroom itself, how good do you feel about this guy leading the program far beyond the brilliant 15 seasons he's already led it?
Pretty good, we'd imagine.
There's a reason Neff didn't watch much basketball that night when he traveled to Blacksburg, only to spend almost the entire night on his phone.
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