Dear Andy: Is Dabo Swinney changing the narrative about Clemson this offseason?

Clemson is making big moves, and you have questions…

From Rob:
Did Dabo Swinney change the narrative by using the portal and making changes in coordinators?

Swinney telegraphed the transfer portal part a year ago, but only those who actually listened to him noticed. The defensive coordinator change became an obvious conclusion as the season progressed got cemented when Texas mauled Clemson’s defense for 6.1 yards a carry in a first-round College Football Playoff game.

But both of these things required Swinney to get outside his comfort zone, and it would be easy for a coach as successful as he has been to just say “I’m still going to do this my way.”

He didn’t, though. And the changes Swinney has made should make everyone bullish on Clemson heading into 2025.

Swinney told us the issue with Clemson and transfers during an interview last May with ESPN’s Roddy Jones on SiriusXM. It wasn’t that he was opposed to them. It was that Clemson’s high school recruiting and retention has been so good that to get a transfer good enough to actually help Clemson was prohibitively expensive. First, Clemson’s fan base — while passionate and willing to donate — is much smaller in number than the fanbases at, say, Alabama or Ohio State. So the NIL budget wasn’t as big. Second, Swinney correctly surmised that it would be dangerous to overspend on a transfer if it then knocked the pay scale for the retained players out of whack. 

With revenue sharing coming — presuming federal judge Claudia Wilken approves the House v. NCAA settlement this spring — Clemson will have enough money to retain the best players on its roster and add transfers at critical positions of need. 

Swinney said this week that the additions are “nothing different” and pointed out that Clemson did take at least one transfer in 2022 and 2023 before taking none last year. But it is different, because Clemson had needs last year and didn’t fill them in the portal. This year the Tigers are.

Swinney isn’t going to suddenly become Lane Kiffin, though. He still wants to build mostly through high school recruiting. And that method — mostly high school signees with a few key portal additions mixed in — is how teams win national titles now. Michigan did it that way last year. Notre Dame or Ohio State will do that Monday night. 

Clemson has taken three transfers so far this cycle: edge rusher Will Heldt (Purdue), linebacker Jeremiah Alexander (Alabama) and receiver Tristan Smith (Southeast Missouri State). Heldt and Smith are accomplished players looking for a step up in competition/team talent. Alexander is a former five-star recruit who hadn’t cracked the starting lineup at Alabama. 

The bigger move was the decision to fire defensive coordinator Wes Goodwin and replace him with Tom Allen, who was Indiana’s head coach before spending the past season as Penn State’s defensive coordinator.

The concern with Clemson for a while was that Swinney had let his program grow too insular. He’d made a lot of internal hires, and that may have stagnated growth. Two years ago, Swinney had to fire homegrown offensive coordinator Brandon Streeter. He replaced him with Garrett Riley, and though it didn’t happen overnight, Riley has made the Tigers’ offense significantly better. (The addition of offensive line coach Matt Luke is another big reason.)

Goodwin also was one of those internal hires. He replaced Brent Venables — whose addition in 2012 was the final piece needed to usher in the greatest era in Clemson football history. When Venables came from Oklahoma, he brought ideas and a fresh perspective that helped an already good program become a great one.

Allen seems like a perfect fit. He and Swinney are quite aligned on the big picture part of running a program, and while Allen the head coach faced plenty of criticism, Allen the DC has delivered pretty much every year. 

Clemson has reasons to be excited on offense. Cade Klubnik isn’t Trevor Lawrence or Deshaun Watson, but he and Riley seem to have finally figured out the best way to utilize his arm and his legs. The young receivers are promising. Now it’s time for the defense to do its part. 

Clemson was in exactly this position 12 years ago when Venables replaced Kevin Steele. The Tigers had an offensive coordinator who grew up in Texas (Chad Morris) who had unlocked a quality quarterback (Tajh Boyd). They added an intense DC (Venables) who had worked in some excellent programs to improve a group that had good athletes but wasn’t getting the desired results.

That worked as well as it possibly could for Swinney once. It could happen again.

From Justin:
This year will be the first year where a transfer QB led a team to a title in the first year with a new team. Something Quinn Ewers, Michael Penix, Jalen Hurts, among many others could not do. Will this be a common new trend? Or will this season still be a rare case of transfer QB success?

This isn’t the first time. This happened 14 years ago when Cam Newton led Auburn to a national title after transferring from Blinn College in Texas. 

But I don’t think it will take another 14 years for this to happen again. Maybe not every year, but certainly every few years. The reason is that unlike the NFL, where an elite quarterback is seemingly a requirement to win the Super Bowl, it’s still possible to win the national title with a merely capable signal-caller surrounded by elite talent.

Ohio State’s Will Howard was a good quarterback at Kansas State, but he never had anything close to Jeremiah Smith or Emeka Egbuka in his receiving corps. Plays that were very difficult to make in Manhattan were suddenly easy to make in Columbus.

Ari Wasserman and I discussed on our show this week whether Kyle McCord would have been able to have Ohio State here had he stayed in Columbus. We agreed that McCord, who led the nation in passing yards and helped Syracuse win 10 games in coach Fran Brown’s first season, probably would have been able to help Ohio State to the national title game as well. This team is so loaded at the skill positions and on defense that it probably would be in this position with any above-average college QB. 

As I wrote earlier this week, it’s going to be difficult going forward to keep that level of top-to-bottom roster talent in a program. But the Ohio States and Georgias will still have years where they have more veteran talent than most of the teams they’ll face. But because quarterbacks move around more frequently than any other players in the sport, there are going to be years when even those teams have holes. And there are going to be capable QBs available in the portal every year.

McCord wanted a guarantee that he’d be QB1 going into 2024 at Ohio State. The coaching staff didn’t want to give it. The job opened. Howard needed a job because Kansas State had decided to give the starting job to Kansas native and elite recruit Avery Johnson. Dillon Gabriel became available to eventual Big Ten champ Oregon because Oklahoma coordinator Jeff Lebby left to become the head coach at Mississippi State. 

The churn rate at quarterback is going to make it so that a first-year transfer does walk into a ready-made offense every once in a while. Or perhaps there is another Newton out there who, due to various circumstances, winds up on a team and becomes the reason it wins a title.

From Andrea:
Will second round playoff games move on campus in future years? If so, what happens to bowl games?

I certainly hope the second-round games move to campus. I’d also be fine with semifinal games moving to campus. Asking fanbases to travel to multiple neutral sites is arrogant, and the expense required to do it probably will make them less likely to travel for earlier rounds once the newness of the system wears off. 

What would happen to the bowl games in that case? They’d still be played, but with teams that didn’t make the CFP. More people watched the non-CFP bowls this year than they did last year. Our nation’s appetite for football during the holiday season isn’t waning.

The Sugar, Peach and Fiesta Bowls wouldn’t suddenly go away if they weren’t part of the CFP. They’d get the next-best teams. Some of the ESPN owned-and-operated bowls near the bottom of the food chain might cease to exist, but that’s fine. They were only created as television programming. If there are other games filling those TV time slots, nothing is lost.

And who knows? If the pecking order changes just a little, maybe On3 will be willing to fulfill my dream and spring for Andy and Ari On3 to sponsor the Myrtle Beach Bowl.

A Random Ranking

From John:
Not a question … but a twist to your weekly ranking. Saw a recent promo for a reboot of Hollywood Squares and with that in mind, configure your College Football Hollywood Squares. Who occupies which square (intrigued to see who you’d put in the center square).

I was an avid watcher of the late-80s version of Hollywood Squares, so nostalgia will not allow me to believe that anyone other than Joan Rivers should occupy the center square. But with Joan cracking wise in heaven, someone must fill the void. I’m not sure if Drew Barrymore can carry Joan’s microphone, but it’s worth a shot. 

As for the college football version of the show, here’s the lineup. 

Host: Rece Davis

Center square: Nick Saban (He has Paul Lynde’s gift for being able to bring down the house with a single sentence. He’s perfect.)

Top row: Deion Sanders, Bret Bielema, Shane Beamer

To Saban’s right: Robert Griffin III

To Saban’s left: Pat McAfee

Bottom row: Cam Newton, Mike Gundy, Paul Finebaum