Dabo Swinney details his personal approach to utilizing the NCAA transfer portal

Dabo Swinney has a very unique approach to the transfer portal at Clemson. The head coach is big on retention and high school recruiting.

That doesn’t mean he won’t use the transfer portal, but he built his program on the foundation of building within. Heck, it got him two national championships at Clemson.

He said pretty much the same thing at the 2023 ACC Football Kickoff.

“Everybody’s different,” Swinney said. “If I took a job today, and you’re living in the portal because you got a lot of guys going. But I mean I’m going on Year 15 and our program is very established and there’s a lot of continuity. We have not lost any starters. You know, what puts us in the portal is starters leaving your program. We don’t have single starter leave. And then the other thing is, if you have a bunch of guys leave after spring practice, you can’t get high school kids. We’ve had two guys leave in the past two years and they were both graduates. 

“We’ve recruited well … So we’ve been a developmental program for a long time, we signed a couple of quarterbacks out of the portal that have filled a need for us. And we’ve actually tried on a couple other guys along the way … But if you look at our roster and we just had a lot of retention. Like this year we had seven guys back that are all graduates, have master’s degrees and I didn’t anticipate any of them being back.”

Of course, Swinney acknowledged if he started today, the portal would be a bigger part of his plan. But Swinney said Clemson likes to be a foundational and developmental program.

He noted players wanting to come back to play for Clemson while earning Master’s degrees. Now that’s player retention.

Regardless of his roster building, Swinney wants to keep it one game at a time in 2023, just like any other coach would.

“No different. Every year we start over,” Swinney said. “Man, we’re just trying to win the opener, honestly. That’s really — that’s the same mindset. If your mindset is any different than that this time of year, you’re probably not in the right head space. Man, you got to take it one at a time. You can’t win two games until you win one. You certainly can’t win ten until you win nine. It just all builds.

“So we’re not locked in on whatever being a gold standard or what other people say or label us outside of expectations. We’re just locked in on what we focus on every day, what we control. That is just trying to win the day, us have a great camp, and we got a tough opener and try to win the opener. Then we’ll go from there.”