Saturday’s game with Wake Forest traveling to Clemson has a sidebar attraction of two schools with some ponderable transfer portal peculiarities, (yes, we like our alliteration today). Clemson doesn’t want to delve into the transfer portal. Wake Forest would play ball in that arena if it had the money to do so.
Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney has made his position clear. He knows he may lose some players to the portal. Last year’s starting quarterback D.J. Uiagalelei is currently spending his Saturdays playing for Oregon State. But Swinney will not go shopping for players in the portal. It is the principle of the issue for him. He has been criticized for not shoring up some of the weaker spots on the current roster with transfer players. Swinney will live with what he has.
That takes us up the road to Winston-Salem. Wake Forest head coach Dave Clawson is not above going to the portal to fill some roster needs. He has done it, albeit rarely, over the last two years and with a significant degree of success. But he has two challenges getting there. His admissions department, and the fact that the school’s NIL ATM machine is just not very flush. Few high-level players transfer without the promise of some NIL cash and Wake’s account balance for such things is below that of many, many, many other schools.
That’s not to say you can have success without the NIL money. Defensive lineman Kobie Turner transferred from Richmond as a grad transfer last year. He had a very successful season and now plays in the NFL for the Rams.
Handcuffed
However, the visible track record of the Wake Forest admissions department does not give Clawson much to work with in terms of undergrad talent that he might like to have. They are a little more lenient with grad transfers. The college credits transfer a little more cleanly and the academic standing is easier to navigate. Someone like Turner goes to Wake Forest to compete in a Power Five conference, play a high-profile schedule, and build up their resume for the next level. If they get a little cash from the Roll the Quad Collective, all the better. Since Wake is a private school the chances of getting information from the Collective on player payouts, in the words of the late Lakers announcer Chick Hearn, “Is slim and none, and Slim just left the building.”
There are Wake players getting Collective money. It just isn’t much when compared to other P5 programs.
Clawson was asked about the transfer portal Tuesday at his weekly press conference. The issue was specifically put up for discussion with regards to quarterbacks, and even more specifically because Wake’s quarterback Mitch Griffis is struggling in his first year as the starter. Clawson had made it clear to Griffis at the end of Spring camp that he, Griffis, was the starter, and the coach was not going to go position shopping. Still, considering the struggles, it was a fair question posed by Les Johns of 247Sports. The answer from Clawson was both long and revealing.
Where’s the Money?
He was considerably cautious in the first parts of his answer. It is tough to break down a complex response into a tweet without losing the value of the thought process that went into the answer.
“If there is a good football player out there that can help us win and fits our culture, we’ll take him.” Sounds simple enough. Of course, nothing in college athletics is ever that simple now or forever moving forward. And Griffis is clearly the guy he has banked on, no pun intended.
Clawson posed the hypothetical that he was without Griffis and backup Michael Kern. “Do people realize what the market is to get a high-caliber starting quarterback?” Clawson asked not so rhetorically. “It’s at least half a million. And for a real good one, it’s at least $750 [thousand], he answered. “We’re not in that market. Part of the reason we want to keep our own is that we don’t have access to that market the way some other schools do.”
Choices Were Made
As Last Word has reported on multiple occasions, decisions had to be made at Wake Forest. The commitment had been made to build the McCreary Football Complex, a state-of-the-art, all-purpose facility for the football players. It came at a cost of $38 million dollars, and 16 months from groundbreaking to grand opening. Sources that spoke to Last Word during the Summer confirmed that as of April, pledge checks were still being sent in for a project that was just a handful of weeks away from opening.
At the grand opening event, Wake Forest athletic director John Currie noted that the money came from 700 donors. Some were smaller donations, others were much grander in scope. And the project was completed with zero lingering debt. But it still took time to collect every last dollar. And the money that went to the facility was not going to the Roll the Quad Collective.
Sources inside the university have estimated to us that there are approximately 75,000 living Wake Forest alums. That does not even fill Neyland Stadium in Knoxville on a Saturday afternoon. More importantly, it means the pool of potential donors, the kind of donors that can give enough money to really make a significant difference is much, much smaller.
The much-ballyhooed names at the top of the collective stationery are highly regarded. But unless Mit Shah, Bob McCreary, Ben Sutton, and the others write the checks, the impact of the donations to the collective has limitations.
Hey, A Little Help Over Here, Please
Clawson talked about how he got a transfer like Turner two off-seasons ago. “Kobie Turner had multiple Power 5 offers,” Clawson said. “At Wake Forest, we offered him an opportunity to play Power 5 football, a clear path to playing time, and a chance to get a Wake Forest graduate degree.” And when they go portal shopping now? “It’s one year later and we’re offering these guys playing time, a chance to play for a winning program, and a Wake Forest degree. When other people are offering those three things, plus an apartment, and a car, and six figures…”
It would be easy to take this and assume Clawson is ungrateful for what he does have to offer potential transfers. He assures us he is not. It’s just what the transfer portal is now. It requires cash. “Fortunately, now we do have a collective that will get better here,” Clawson told us. “I’m hopeful.”
It is not just about being competitive for the guys in the portal. It is also being able to fend off the pillagers from the other schools. The minute Sam Hartman left for Notre Dame, (instead of the NFL), it was rumored he got $2 million. The social media rumors about what players get when they go to a new school are almost never accurate. Last Word has confirmed repeatedly that he did not get that dollar amount. It is closer to $1.4 million with other endorsements coming in that can take it to around $1.7 million. That did not meet the rumored number, but when Wake is only able to throw around a couple hundred thousand here and there, Clawson is more like Sisyphus trying to push the boulder up the hill.
Being Happy With What You Have
It is now the pay-for-play world of collectives. There are fewer and fewer pure NIL sponsorship deals. Clawson said a few of his linemen were approached during the off-season about going into the portal with promises of money somewhere else on the other side. He said they went to him not looking for more money from Wake, but to put him in the loop of what had happened. The Wake collective chipped in, although not likely to the level of what they could have gotten from what Clawson described as “Big Ten schools.”
“That’s the reality of college football,” Clawson said matter of factly. “That’s why to me our emphasis is on, we’ve got to keep our own. And that gets hard.”
So as you watch Saturday’s game at Clemson, and you see the rosters, know that it is one school that only wants what it has and no one else, and another school that would not mind the shopping trip if they could only get a boost in their allowance.
