In case you hadn’t noticed, Clemson is 4-1 and at 3-0 in conference play is sitting atop the ACC. After the beatdown at the hands of Georgia in week one, media pundits and fans alike were ready to throw dirt on the program’s grave. Head coach Dabo Swinney’s complex relationship with the transfer portal made it all even easier to grab a shovel.
Clemson finished 9-4 overall last year and 4-4 in the conference. That would fly for a lot of schools. But not Clemson. The expectations are appropriately different based on past success. To put a bigger spotlight on the status of the program, Swinney was vocal in his opposition to using the transfer portal to shore up weak spots on the roster.
Dabo Swinney and the New World Order
In past years Swinney was also open in his criticism of NIL revenue for athletes, once going so far as to say that once players were getting paid, maybe it was time for him to move on. Players are getting paid. Next year actual revenue sharing comes to a school near you. And Dabo is still here with the portal being his line in the sand.
Coming into the 2024 season, the knock on Clemson’s roster from a national point of view was the lack of elite talent at receiver. And certainly, there was talent there for the taking in the portal. But Dabo stood his ground. Rightly or wrongly he has stuck with his philosophy and been content to swim against the stream of the what is the current version of roster management.
Clemson plays at Wake Forest this weekend. The Demon Deacons have a grad transfer at quarterback, as well as transfers at a few other spots. Wake does not get a lot of transfers and head coach Dave Clawson does not shy away from discussing why, (hint: it has to do with money). But we asked Clawson what his thoughts were on Dabo holding strong to his convictions on how to build a roster.
Clawson’s Take
“He believes in what he believes,” Clawson said. “And the level that they recruit at with high school players is a really high level.” The 11th-year Wake Forest coach said the high school recruiting along with the player development means they don’t have the inclination to rent players for a year or two.
Clawson also pointed out that Swinney does not need to fill holes the way other programs do, because Clemson does not lose as many to the portal as some schools do.
In fact, since the onset of the portal in 2019, Clemson has lost a total of 54 players. That’s one year at Colorado. It’s a couple of recruiting/portal cycles at many schools.
The Tigers lost 11 players via the portal between the Winter and Spring windows, before the start of the 2024 season. Only one was more than a three-star recruit coming out of high school. By comparison, ACC competitor Georgia Tech lost 32 players to the portal during the same period. Wake Forest, since we involved them in this article, lost 14.
Building the Old Fashioned Way
With the limits taken off high school signees per recruiting class, Swinney just builds up from within. That’s not to say he has never dabbled in the portal. According to tracking by 247Sports, he has signed two backup quarterbacks out of the portal. None were in the current 2024 portal class. The only schools to sign fewer recruits are the three service academies, for obvious reasons.
“Because of the level they recruit at from high school, and the fact that they have very little attrition, they don’t lose 30 and 40 players like some of these schools that are signing 30 and 40 transfers,” Clawson said.
He added that there is a financial equation that works with Clemson. It is how the football front office manages its money from the Collective. “When you go to the portal to fix problems, it is super expensive,” he said. “And I’m sure Clemson has the money to do it. But then the problem becomes when you guy from the outside and you have to pay him two, three, and four times more than you’re paying players on your own team, what does that do to the locker room?”
Clawson said keeping the player payroll at some level of internal equity allows the players who stay, which is the vast majority of the roster, to have more time to develop.
Options and Moving On
The quarterback position may be a case in point for Clemson. Cade Klubnik was seen as the future two seasons ago when the freshman replaced DJ Uiagalelei during the season. But in 2023, working with new offensive coordinator Garrett Riley, Klubnik was rather pedestrian at times. Yeah, he threw at a 64% completion rate. But the offense did not move as fluidly as the coaching staff expected.
There were plenty of quarterbacks who could have been brought in while Klubnik continued to develop. Clawson did it with Hank Bachmeier. Swinney stuck with Klubnik. The payoff is not only the 4-1 record. but an offense that has grown. A second year of Riley and Klubnik working together has given Clemson a quarterback whose yards per completion and yards per attempt have gone up by nearly 30%. The offense can be a little bolder. Klubnik’s touchdown to interception ratio has also improved.
The sample size for 2024 has to be taken into account. Clemson got manhandled by an elite-level Georgia team. They then ran off four straight against the likes of Appalachian State, NC State, Stanford, and Florida State. Not exactly a murderer’s row of opponents. And they still have to face an improved Virginia team as well as Louisville and Pitt. The proof is still in the pudding. But Swinney will be sticking with his pudding recipe.
