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Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney has not always been the biggest proponent for paying college football players and embracing what is to come in the sport, but he seemed quite optimistic about the Tigers’ overall outlook heading into the future during a Tuesday press conference.
As Grace Raynor of The Athletic relayed, Swinney opened up about topics such as revenue sharing with athletes, the transfer portal, NIL opportunities and more.
“Nobody’s gonna have more money than Clemson. Nobody,” he said of impending revenue sharing. “For the first time ever. That’ll be good.”
As Raynor explained, the college sports world is waiting for approval of the House settlement that will allow athletic departments to share 22 percent of their annual revenue with athletes. The cap is expected to be at $20.5 million per school, and that money can be distributed to various athletes across various sports of the school’s choosing.
“Those are decisions that you have to make year-to-year but everybody will have the same money, and when I say nobody’s gonna have more money than Clemson, that’s because of the commitment from our administration,” Swinney said.
There will also be opportunities for athletes outside of the revenue sharing, but the Tigers head coach called NIL “a challenge” for his program and encouraged fans and alumni to donate.
Being so open about the need for more money to pay players is quite the shift for Swinney, who famously said in 2014 he might quit college football entirely with such developments.
“As far as paying players, professionalizing college athletics, that’s where you lose me,” he said at the time. “I’ll go do something else because there’s enough entitlement in this world as there is.”
Swinney has also received plenty of criticism for his hesitancy to use the transfer portal in the new age of college football. While he didn’t suggest he is suddenly going to start bringing in tons of players from the portal in the future, he did advocate for some changes to the overall calendar.
“To me there should just be one portal window—it’s in the spring and you’re done with it,” he said. “If we had just a little more common sense we could fix it. But it’s where we are.”
Having just one spring portal window instead of another one in December would mean coaches and teams who are actively preparing for College Football Playoff games and bowl games while recruiting high school classes won’t also have to worry about players on the current roster transferring out before postseason games.
Swinney also called the idea of capping rosters at 105 players with 85 scholarships “the worst thing” because of the lost opportunities for walk-ons and the greater availability of players for practices over the course of a long season.
All of this comes ahead of a massive game against rival South Carolina for the Tigers.
If Clemson wins, it will have a solid chance to make the CFP. It would also have a chance to make the CFP if Syracuse defeats Miami and opens up a spot for Swinney’s team in the ACC Championship Game against SMU.
It wasn’t long ago the Tigers were one of the gold standards of college football. They reached four national championship games and won two of them during the five seasons from 2015 to 2019.
Yet they missed the CFP entirely in each of the past three seasons and failed to win double-digit games last season for the first time since 2010. It wasn’t difficult to make an argument that the program was trending in the wrong direction, especially with other powerhouses relying on things like the transfer portal.
However, Clemson has the opportunity to build momentum and perhaps reach the CFP with a strong finish this season. And Swinney sounds optimistic about what the future holds, which is surely welcome news for Tigers fans.
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