Dabo Swinney's Reluctance To Utilize The Transfer Portal Isn't The End Of The World

Clemson coach Dabo Swinney is looking to lead his team back to the top of the college football world for the first time since 2018, but will approach that quest in a very unique way. The Tigers are the only team in a Power Four conference that didn’t accept a transfer player this offseason, and one of only four in the Football Bowl Subdivision (Army, Navy and Air Force are the others).

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Swinney commented on the distinction on the ACC Network on Tuesday night.

"Well, it wasn't really necessarily like an intentional thing," Swinney said on ACC PM (via 247Sports). "There were a couple guys we looked at. They gotta love you, too. That's the other part of it. And honestly, every player is technically a transfer. We just signed a whole class of guys transferring from high school. So we like our guys. We like our starters."

That set off a firestorm of criticism on social media and beyond.

Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney. (Credit: Getty Images)

Can we just chill out for a second?

I know that Swinney has been a lighting rod for a variety of reasons, including the role of religion in his program, reluctance to make staff shakeups and dust-ups with callers on his local radio show. In proper context, though, Swinney is simply doing what he always does — preach a culture of togetherness.

"When you evaluate what's out there, you compare it to where you are, and we decided to stay the course," Swinney said. "It's not just a Coach Swinney thing. This is a collective group of people who are all aligned with our team. Love these guys."

This is the exact message he used to build his program into a national power to begin with. The "all-in" mentality and love for each other was personified in 2018 when defensive lineman Christian Wilkins and a host of other Tigers decided to stick around instead of making millions in the NFL. All that team did was win the national title.

Yes, this is a new era of college football and the transfer portal is a big part of it. But it’s not like Clemson has struggled. The Tigers reached the double-digit win mark in 12 straight seasons (2011-22), and "struggled" to a 9-4 finished last season. Those quotation marks are in parenthesis because it’s clearly the floor for the program. When your floor is a nine-win season, you’re doing alright for yourself.

(Photo by John Byrum/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

Swinney built the program in his image and is staying true to himself with his ideology. Will it work? That remains to be seen. But we shouldn’t be surprised by any of this.

All Swinney did with his quotes on Tuesday was peel back the curtain even more on what the transfer portal and NIL era is all about — market awareness.

"Honestly there was really only one spot on our team that we felt like, because there was not necessarily a gap in age but just experience, and that was at center, and we looked at a couple guys but we really wanted to get through this spring" Swinney said on ACC PM. "But man, we really love what Ryan Linthicum did. That kid has been there for three years. We really love what we saw out of him, and Harris Sewell, who ended up starting as a freshman for us last year. This kid has his whole career. Trent Howard, who's a senior for us this year."

In reality, Swinney did the exact same thing LSU’s Brian Kelly and Auburn’s Hugh Freeze did last week. Kelly said that he wasn’t in the market for "buying players" in the context of overpaying for defensive lineman. Freeze said that he wasn’t interested in a "million-dollar quarterback" and was content with developing Payton Thorne in Thorne’s second year in the program.

What’s the problem? As fans and media members, we can’t complain about the cloak of secrecy surrounding the new era and then get pissed off when we find out about what’s going on in the new era. It just so happens that Swinney, along with Freeze and Kelly, are lighting rods for criticism in the college football world for a variety of reasons (some justified, some not).

Give Swinney a break and let’s see what the Tigers do in the 12-team playoff era. After all, his plan worked well before.