Dabo Swinney is a man of faith. Dabo Swinney proudly, and often, proclaims that faith. Dabo Swinney is the head football coach for Clemson University, a public school in South Carolina.

These are not unrelated items, certainly not to Swinney, who credits Christianity for driving his inspirational life story – overcoming a troubled family to rise to the upper tiers of college coaching where he's turned the Tigers into a big winner.

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You spend anytime around the 44-year-old and you are going to hear about Jesus, Scripture, and the power of it all. It isn't necessarily, or at least not always, done to proselytize. It's part of how he talks, how he lives. Faith, Family, Football – that's about it with him.

There is no delineation.

For the people at the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a non-profit out of Madison, Wis., there needs to be or he shouldn't have his job.

In what is, if nothing else, an absolutely fascinating subject, the FFRF sent a letter of complaint to Clemson this week about "several serious constitutional concerns" over how "Christian worship seems interwoven into the Clemson football program."

Responding to what it says was a complaint sent to it by a member of the public, the FFRF had one of its five staff attorneys investigate the program via open records requests over the constitutionally protected separation between church and state.

It uncovered a host of issues, from Swinney directly hiring the team chaplain (even Clemson policy says the players should choose), to coaches participating in testimonials and bible studies, to buses being organized to transport the entire team to "Church Day" at a local Baptist Church.

The letter, in great detail, cites various university policies and case law that are violated by these actions. It's a thorough letter. And it goes after Swinney, who it claims as a public employee is barred from participating in any official capacity in the religious activities of his players or underlings.

"Fire the coach, stop praying and start playing," Annie Laurie Gaylor, the co-founder and co-president of FFRF told Yahoo Sports. "I think this coach has really crossed the line."

The FFRF claims Swinney clearly shows favor to one religion – by hiring a chaplain of that religion, for instance. Thus, it says, the environment is coercive because players of different faith or no faith feel pressure to conform to the wishes of the guy who holds playing time and advancement over them.

Clemson denies that Swinney or the athletic department has done anything wrong and has announced no further investigation into the situation.

"We believe the practices of the football staff regarding religion are compliant with the Constitution and appropriately accommodate differing religious views," the school wrote in a statement, declining further comment. "Participation in religious activities is purely voluntary, and there are no repercussions for students who decline to do so."

Clemson isn't bothering to defend each item of complaint at this point. Regardless, there are some simple and common sense solutions that quite frankly someone at Clemson should have enacted a long time ago. You didn't need to be a constitutional scholar to realize it might be best to let the players choose their chaplain (or, better yet, not have one at all), or steer clear of "Church Days" and certainly don't organize group busing options, even if privately paid for, to faith-based events.

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