Clemson Tigers head coach Dabo Swinney has been famously reluctant to use the transfer portal since its inception, and it doesn’t sound like that’s going to be changing anytime soon.
During a recent press conference, Dabo Swinney explained why Clemson has not used the transfer portal to bring in players the way that many other programs around the country have. And he explained that he simply doesn’t think that it’s something Clemson usually needs to do.
“Everybody’s different. 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 a 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,” Swinney said according to On3.
“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.”
So while other schools may be using the portal to help build and bolster their rosters, it seems Swinney and Clemson will be content with the players they sign out of high school.
[On3]
