Blatant Homerism: Clemson is failing at everything going right
After the Clemson Tigers finished receiving a 34-3 ass kicking from the Georgia Bulldogs, much of the commentariat’s postgame conversation focused on the recent decline of coach Dabo Swinney’s program.
From 2015 to 2020, Little Ol’ Clemson went on a superb run of success. In those six seasons, the Tigers:
Won two national championships;
Appeared in two more national championship games; and
Played in the College Football Playoff every year.
On top of that, the Tigers won six consecutive ACC titles in that stretch. You could make a strong case Clemson was every bit the equal of Alabama’s juggernaut during that particular stretch.
What really stood out about Clemson’s approach was that it represented a stark departure from the blueprint Crimson Tide coach Nick Saban laid out in Tuscaloosa (and at LSU before that). Aided by a spare-no-expense athletic department and booster class, Saban became famous for taking everything to the max. That started with a dogged approach to recruiting that produced 10 top-ranked signing classes in 13 years between 2011 and 2023. Ruthless roster management also helped Saban and his ever-expanding coaching staff create a healthy balance of today’s contributors with budding stars of the future among Bama’s personnel.
While Alabama fielded a team that ranked first or second in the 247Sports College Football Team Talent Composite every year from 2015 to 2020, most of Swinney’s squads fell in the range of nine to 13 on that same index. The Tigers had plenty of dudes, but not to the overwhelming extent the Crimson Tide did.
But of the dudes Clemson did have, they were stacked in key positions. In addition to an assembly line of NFL-caliber players on the defensive line, an equally significant number of game-breaking wide receivers found their way to Howard’s Rock. Most importantly, they had two truly elite quarterbacks during that period in Deshaun Watson and Trevor Lawrence.
Corporate-like efficiency defined Bama’s reign of terror, and Saban acolyte Kirby Smart is now implementing the same game plan at Georgia. However, Clemson showed that if you could consistently hit a baseline level of talent – which was, admittedly, still quite high – and mix in superstars in the right places, your team could compete year in and year out with those relentless war machines. The Tigers did it for six years.
So what’s the matter with Clemson now?
Ironically, Swinney and his staff are recruiting even better today than they were a decade ago. The Tigers have ranked no worse than fifth in the 247Sports Talent Composite in the last five seasons. Top to bottom, their roster has gotten stronger since they played for a national championship in 2015. That should position Clemson to be even more competitive today with a squad like Georgia. Moreover, all those wins on the high school recruiting trail throw cold water on the talk that Swinney’s vocal disdain for compensating players is hamstringing the program’s ability to acquire talent.
Would embracing the transfer portal improve Clemson’s lot? Anything is possible, but consider the number of transfers who were: a) on the market this offseason; and b) better than what the Tigers already had on hand. The pool isn’t big. Even if Clemson upgraded its lineup where possible with players from the portal who were superior to those already in the fold, that team almost assuredly gets blasted by Georgia last weekend.
In fact, there is nothing actually wrong with the Tigers now. What has changed over the course of the last four years is that everything didn’t go right for Clemson.
Primarily, mediocre QBs in DJ Uiagalelei and Cade Klubnik followed Watson and Lawrence. And after sending studs like Mike Williams and Tee Higgins to the NFL, Clemson hasn’t seen one of its wide receivers selected in the last three drafts.
That’s how you get from going toe to toe with the greatest dynasty college football has ever seen to putting up a string of 10-3 records. Because the Tigers failed to replace legitimately elite players at high-impact positions with a new crop of legitimately elite players, their great teams became good ones. They are still better than most of their peers, but they’re not hanging with the best.
Clemson has reached its current state because you can’t bat 1.000 forever. The Alabamas and Georgias of college football have separated themselves precisely because things inevitably go wrong – players get hurt, assistant coaches leave for other jobs, et cetera. Rather than counting on always being right, they mitigate the damage of being wrong by throwing resources at their problems. So their backups are better than yours. They build bigger coaching staffs and pay their assistants more. And on and on.
Swinney’s retrograde opinions on player empowerment and compensation could certainly use an overhaul. Even though the gains to be made through the portal are marginal at best, giving up on his stubborn refusal to accept transfers would still help the Tigers realize a more of their potential.
Those moves represent little more than tinkering around the margins for a program like Clemson, though. If the Tigers have a problem now, it’s that they threaded the needle on competing for national championships long enough that they convinced people it could last forever. Unfortunately, no one is that good.
Post-script
In relation to the broader landscape of college football, when we talk about programs competing for national championships now, it inevitably reverts to arms-race thinking. Bigger coaching staffs, richer NIL deals, state-of-the-art technology – all require more investment.
That has always been true about college football to some degree, but a variety of factors now confer an even stronger competitive advantage to teams with the biggest war chests. Information flows more efficiently today, for example, reducing asymmetries in player evaluation and acquisition that smaller programs could exploit in recruiting. The same goes for schematic advantages, as competitors can analyze and acquire information about other programs more easily than ever.
Meanwhile, reducing the restrictions on player movement has made both transferring and accepting transfers more appealing to both players and teams. Talent can flow more readily between lower-resourced/less prestigious programs to power programs as a result.
All of this comes at a time when winning a national championship will require playing more games than ever before: Expanding the College Football Playoff field to 12 teams in the new format means the winner must play no fewer than 16 games in a season. At least three of those games will come in the span of a month at the end of the year against other teams good enough qualify for the CFP. It seems reasonable to expect the programs with greater depth of talent on their rosters will be best equipped to survive the postseason slog.
In sum, despite increasing access to the postseason tournament for more teams, competitive realities have probably narrowed the field of teams capable of winning national championships. So prepare for an even smaller group of national title winners in the future.