CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Dabo Swinney has built a proven winner at Clemson, from two national championships and eight Atlantic Coast Conference titles to stringing together 13 straight seasons with at least nine wins.
He looks at that as validation for an approach that has mostly resisted diving into the recent growth of college free agency through the transfer portal.
“I’m just for the guys that we have,” Swinney said Thursday during the ACC’s preseason football media days.
It certainly makes the Tigers an outlier. Marquee-name programs are loading up with experienced additions, including four- and five-star talents, across the four power conferences. That includes in the ACC, where a transfer-bolstered Florida State won the conference title last season while Miami, Louisville, California, North Carolina State and Syracuse all have top-25 transfer classes for this fall. That could represent an added challenge for the Tigers in returning to the top of the league.
“In the past, pre-portal, you would look into the junior-college areas, sometimes find a transfer that was a (graduate) to fill a spot where maybe you had an injury or player left early to go to the NFL,” Wolfpack coach Dave Doeren said. “Obviously now there’s outflow and inflow coming in at different times differently than there ever has been.”
At minimum, it has made it easier for coaches to bolster talented rosters or quickly turn around programs after taking over a new job. The movement between rosters remains steady, except when it comes to inbound traffic toward the South Carolina campus that borders Lake Hartwell.
Swinney has defended his approach almost stubbornly amid questions about the team’s lack of portal activity and the risk of falling behind the nation’s best. He points to the Tigers luring top-flight classes of high school recruits (Clemson has amassed nine top-10 classes in the past 10 years) and then keeping them around.
“I said earlier today: If I took a job somewhere else, I’d be the greatest portal recruiter ever because half of my roster would be gone and I’d have to put it together,” Swinney said. “But if you study our team, our retention is as good anybody in the country. Guys graduate, they stay, and we recruit.”
He can also point to a long run of success that included winning six straight ACC titles with accompanying trips to the College Football Playoff from 2015-20. But as NCAA rules loosened to allow portal movement to grow, Clemson has lost 10 games in the past three seasons — matching its total for the seven seasons before that — and last year’s 9-4 mark ended a run of 12 straight years with 10 wins or more.
Clemson has also won the ACC just once (2022) since that long, dominating run and hasn’t made the CFP since the 2020 team that featured No. 1 overall NFL draft pick Trevor Lawrence at quarterback.
Meanwhile, there’s a lot of available talent moving throughout the sport.
The 67 other schools in the Power Four conferences — the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten and Southeastern — along with Notre Dame, added 1,063 transfers for the upcoming season at an average of 15.9 per school, according to 247Sports. Roughly 17% of those (179) are considered four-star prospects. Six were five-star additions, with Ohio State landing two, while Alabama, Texas, Oregon and Mississippi got the others.
In the ACC specifically, schools added an average of 14.8 transfers, with 2.2 of those being four-star talents.
Florida State rolled to its first ACC title since 2014 with a roster that included first-year transfers in Associated Press second-team All-American Braden Fiske at defensive tackle and first-team all-ACC receiver Keon Coleman. The Seminoles are ranked seventh nationally in terms of transfer class for the upcoming season, too.
Compare that to Clemson, which added backup quarterbacks Hunter Johnson (from Northwestern in 2022) and Paul Tyson (from Arizona State in 2023) in the past two seasons — an influx that amounted to a total of 10 passing attempts — and made no additions this year.
Swinney’s players, at least, like that approach.
“That’s one thing I love about Coach Swinney,” running back Phil Mafah said. “He’s loyal to his guys, believes in what he believes in.”
“If something happens, he’s not just going to bring somebody in,” safety R.J. Mickens said. “He’s going to wait on somebody and give somebody a chance that’s been there and not been able to play.”
Some of the Tigers’ top challengers in the ACC title chase did the opposite.
Miami joined FSU with a top-10 transfer class. Louisville’s Jeff Brohm added 31 transfers to refresh the roster after his debut season ended with a trip to the ACC title game, with Brohm saying Wednesday: “Our philosophy is we want to win now.”
N.C. State’s class included its next starting quarterback in 10,000-yard career passer Grayson McCall, a proven runner in Duke back Jordan Waters, receiver help in Ohio State’s Noah Rogers and a veteran center in Notre Dame’s Zeke Correll (31 starts dating to 2020).
And at Syracuse, first-year coach Fran Brown added a class that included Ohio State quarterback Kyle McCord and Texas A&M defensive lineman Fadil Diggs.
“Difference maker (for) one year,” Brown said of his approach. “Difference maker. Otherwise we’ve got to be at least two years because you won’t fit into our culture. ... Once you start to take players over your culture, then it’s not a program. It’s a football team.”
Swinney called the portal a “great tool” for coaches and for players and didn’t criticize other programs for using it. He also pointed out it’s not as simple as just drafting whoever he wants.
“This past year, we had one spot that we were trying to get a couple of guys, and we didn’t get them,” Swinney said. “It takes two to get that done. But we like our roster.”
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