Dabo Swinney on not signing any transfers: 'Every player is technically a transfer'

Dabo Swinney doubled down on Clemson not signing any transfers once again. Well, they did in a technical sense according to the Tigers’ coach.

Clemson was the only non-service academy to not take any transfers among college football programs. For a national title winning program, it is bizarre in this day and age.

But, Swinney stuck to his guns regarding that mentality.

“It wasn’t really necessarily like an intentional thing,” Swinney said on ACC PM. “There’s a couple of guys we looked at but you know, they gotta love you too … And honestly, every player is technically a transfer. You know, we just signed a whole class of guys that transferred from high school. So we like our guys, we like our starters. We look at every position and we say, okay, coach you’re getting to get you know, two corners. You want a transfer? No, sir. I like my guys. Here’s the guys in recruiting and you know, so there’s a lot that goes into it.”

While Clemson didn’t bring anyone in, but Swinney mentioned how the program barely lost any players to the portal as well.

“We had 127 players go through spring and 125 are still on our roster post-portal,” Swinney said. “So we should get, like, a trophy. By the way, we don’t have many guys leave without a degree. We just had the highest graduation success rate. Like you know, you asked me that and we’re part of that group. But we have the highest graduation success rate in all of college football, and the highest I think in the Power Five in the last 20 years. And so, to me, that’s good.”

This isn’t anything new for Swinney and Clemson. He spoke in December about this being the identity of the program.

“You know, it’s just where we are as a program,” Swinney said December 23. “We haven’t gotten into the situation yet where we’ve had big massive gaps in our roster. So I’m glad we got Tyler Brown for a few more years instead of just one… you know. I’m glad we got Antonio Williams for a couple more years, I’m glad we got Cole Turner for maybe four more years, you know. You get this year back.”

For those who want to critique that style of roster building, well, Swinney says he’s got quite the track record to reflect on having built a lot of elite college football teams on the back of organic high school recruiting.

“So I mean, that’s just — we’ve won. I mean, I know we only had eight wins this year, but there’s only two other teams that have had 13 8+ plus win seasons in a row,” Swinney said. “That’s Georgia and Alabama. So I think that’s just how we’ve done it. We’ve been consistent with graduation and we’ve been consistent with winning because of how we recruit.

“And again, we evaluate everything every year, so we get a situation where we think: if you bring somebody in, you got to let somebody go, you know, that’s the way it works and you know I love the guys here.”