Dabo Swinney emphatic that canceling spring games 'ain't gonna stop tampering'

Amid a handful of spring game cancellations over tampering concerns, Clemson coach Dabo Swinney is making it abundantly clear that he’s not worried about that.

The Tigers will host a spring game and Swinney will deal with whatever fallout that leads to. He sounded skeptical that hosting a spring game will more easily facilitate tampering anyway.

“We’re going to have a spring game and I hope we can have some type of fan day with it as well,” Dabo Swinney said. “I don’t know, we’ll see. Listen, whether you have a spring game or not it’s going to be tampering.”

For the long-time Clemson head coach, there are just too many other avenues for teams to get quality information on players for him to cut down on his own practice and scrimmage time based on that concern.

He even referenced an in-depth analytical and scouting service called Pro Football Focus as evidence.

“Ain’t nobody going to go look at the spring game, go, ‘Oh yeah, boy,'” Dabo Swinney said. “They got PFF. That’s called PFF, they’ve got everything on everybody already. Canceling the spring game ain’t going to stop tampering. We’re going to need a lot more help than that to stop tampering. And hopefully at some point that’ll happen.”

Indeed, many college coaches and athletics administrators are hoping legislation comes down soon from the Congressional bodies looking into issues like NIL and player compensation.

In the meantime, it’ll be business as usual at Clemson.

Dabo Swinney outlined that though they’ll have a spring game, some players may not participate. That’s the nature of having a roster with some veterans on it.

“I just think, again, when you look at, when you evaluate things, I mean for us for example, you look at your career snaps, your career offensive, defensive snaps and Blake Miller‘s probably top of that list for us,” Swinney said. “You look at those guys that have played a ton of snaps. Do I really need to see Blake play live this spring? No. He needs to get some work, and he’ll get a lot of work, but you’ll limit his live work. He doesn’t need a lot of live work. But you know who does? All those other dudes.”

So Clemson and Dabo Swinney will host their spring game as usual.