Dabo Swinney on Clemson's helmet stickers: 'Hopefully people will respect our young men'

A few notes following tonight’s session with Coach Swinney. The full audio is above.

• Swinney on kicking off the 2020 season: “Special win for us. Something that I’ll never forget."
• Swinney says there were no major negatives “at all” to him after the Wake Forest game.
• Swinney says they are excited to get into a normal routine with game week practice.
• Swinney, “We’ve just got to develop our second OL, but man are they going to be some players."
• Dabo Swinney, “Didn’t create any turnovers, that was one of the disappointments."
• Swinney says that Ruke Orhorhoro and Tyler Davis are both having MRIs.
• Swinney on Myles Murphy, “Yeah, he’s pretty special. He and (Bryan) Bresee are freshmen on paper only. For a true freshman, he really has all the attributes that you look for."
• Swinney says he will be surprised if this entire group of freshmen turn out to be what they were on paper in 4 or 5 years.

On Trevor Lawrence trusting his arm too much at times early on last season. How nice was it to see him start the year the way he did last night?

"He was amazing. Obviously the sack on the first series, that was a really bad play. All he had to do is just get rid of the ball there and he held on to it too long but put us in a bad spot that was probably his biggest error of the game. He did miss Frank (Ladson) one time, wide open, but it's so easy to kind of see what he didn't do because there's only two or three things.”

“He was awesome, just complete command. Made a lot of different types of throws, whether it's in the pocket, sliding in the pocket, moving to his left, moving to his right, throwing off his back foot. I mean, he made a lot of different types of throws in the game. It's a shame we didn't get to Amari (Rodgers) there because that was a great play, well anticipated, had to kind of hold it a little longer than he would have liked. But he was tremendous. I mean really tremendous. Did a nice job with his legs as well. And just super, super proud of him."

Swinney on helmet stickers and the negative response from some fans:

“That's a new rule this year that the NCAA changed in response to a lot of things going on in our world right now. And allow the teams' individual players to express themselves or create awareness in different things,” Swinney said. “I support my guys. Not everybody's gonna think the same. And that's never gonna be the case. But these are young people that had been challenged with a lot of things. They're developing young people. They came up with several different things and they got together as a team on what they wanted to do, just like all the teams are doing.”

Swinney continued, “I support them in all that they're dealing with and trying to figure out and trying to navigate at this time. There's always going to be disappointment. Nobody's going to ever fully agree on certain things. But hopefully, people can respect our young men and what they believe in and what their different causes are, that they want to bring awareness to or support or whatever that may be, through whatever platforms that have been made available to them."