Clemson coach Dabo Swinney went in-depth with his position on the transfer portal Monday night.
Speaking on his weekly call-in radio show, Swinney again addressed the long-standing policy he has of not bringing in players from other programs. The winner of two national championships made it clear that doing things his way has worked well for the Tigers.
“I think what we have done around here has worked,” Swinney said. “We might not make it to a seventh playoff in a row. It might not happen, but I think who we have been and the way we have done things … I can’t tell you how many times over my 13 years that everybody has said, ‘We’ve got to do this. We have to do that.’ And what we have done is done it the Clemson way. It has led us to many playoffs and multiple national championships.”
His stance comes with specific exceptions, he said, given the NCAA’s recent implementation of a one-time transfer rule that allows players who haven’t previously transferred to be immediately eligible at another FBS school.
What are they?
“The only thing that’s really going to change for us is if we’ve got starters packing up and leaving or we have a bunch of young players pack up and leave,” Swinney said. “Because up until now, you couldn’t do that. You’d sit a year. Young people always think the grass is greener, especially in today’s era. It’s just kind of the easy thing to do as opposed to getting better, developing and those type of things.
“And then you’ve got this big mid-year deal that’s going on now in the world (with early enrollees). Well let’s just say you sign 15 mid-year guys that come in January and all of a sudden you’ve got five of them that say, ‘You know what, we don’t like it here.’ And they leave in May. Well who are you going to recruit? There are no high school kids to recruit in May, so you have to go to the portal. So for us, it would be if it’s strategically something that made us better, that we had a glaring need because of an exodus of a group of players, young players or whatever or we just kind of get caught in a weird situation with injuries or whatever, we’re open to anything. But we’re not going to just change to change and say, ‘OK, let’s start going and doing all these things.’ It’s a week-by-week, month-by-month, day-by-day type of a process when it comes to managing your roster.”
As for the players that have left his program in recent years, Swinney said they’ve been graduates or underclassmen who weren’t starters but wanted a chance to do so elsewhere with their remaining eligibility, though senior running back Lyn-J Dixon started one game this season before leaving the program three games in after losing his spot there. And of the players in the portal this past offseason, he said there weren’t any that he felt like could come in and start.
Swinney said that’s because of the nationwide success he and his staff have had over time in signing top high school talent.
“Nyles Pinckney, he wanted a chance to go and start, and Minnesota was a good spot for him. Jordan Williams was going to be a backup for us. A good player, but he wanted a chance to go start. And he went up to Virginia Tech.
“If I was at a different place, (it might be different). But we’ve been able to recruit the best of the best at Clemson. If I was the head coach at another school, my philosophy would be very different if we didn’t feel like we could recruit the best of the best. Or if we were a program where people were going to kind of come in, develop and leave.”
When it comes to the idea of adding transfers, though, Swinney said he’s largely going to stick with developing the players that are already on the roster.
“We’ve got a great roster and a very talented roster,” he said. “It’s something I keep my pulse on 24-7, and we’re always going to do what we need to do to compete at the highest level, and that’s what we’ve done for a long, long time. And we’ll continue to do that whether that’s take an Adam Humphries, a Grady Jarrett, get a Trevor Lawrence, get a Bryan Bresee. Whatever it is, we’re going to always do what’s best for Clemson.”
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