Dabo Swinney will coach in one the most significant rivalry games of his career on Saturday afternoon when Clemson hosts South Carolina with possible College Football Playoff implications on the line.
But on Tuesday afternoon, the future of college football at large was also on Swinney’s mind, with the Tigers head coach weighing in on a number of topics facing the sport, including revenue sharing, NIL, roster limits and the transfer portal window.
“Nobody’s gonna have more money than Clemson. Nobody,” a smiling Swinney said of impending revenue sharing. “For the first time ever. That’ll be good.”
Clemson’s path forward
Swinney pushed back on the notion that he was against paying players in the past — he went viral in 2014 for his comments against professionalizing college football — and spoke positively about revenue sharing, which he believes will benefit the Tigers as the sport’s landscape continues to shift.
Clemson coach Dabo Swinney says it’s “not accurate” that he once said he’d walk away from CFB if players got paid and the “professionalization” he was referring to was if CFB did away with education, which isn’t happening. So, what does he think of revenue sharing? “I love it” pic.twitter.com/4gb9NgNJgj
— Chapel Fowler (@chapelfowler) November 26, 2024
Pending final approval of the House settlement, athletic departments can opt into sharing 22 percent of their annual revenue with players as early as next year, which would come out to about a $20.5 million cap per school.
“We’ve always had the money at Clemson. We just haven’t been able to share it,” Swinney said. “And now we can.”
Each school can decide how it wants to divvy up that $20-plus million among different sports and individual players, but Clemson’s administration will be aggressive in making sure the football program is taken care of.
Swinney, who has long been an advocate of national standards when it comes to player compensation, sounded pleased about the cap, which he believes should instill “some order.”
But he wants to begin having conversations about revenue sharing now, ahead of next school year. That starts with educating players about financial literacy — Clemson plans to bring in financial advisors to talk to the team twice a week — and determining how the school will split up the money.
“Those are decisions that you have to make year-to-year but everybody will have the same money, and when I say nobody’s gonna have more money than Clemson, that’s because of the commitment from our administration,” Swinney said.
Expect starting quarterback Cade Klubnik to benefit as much as anyone.
“If you’ve got a fourth-year quarterback who’s a three-year starter,” Swinney said, “you best believe he’s gonna do pretty good, right?”
The NIL push
Swinney acknowledged that Clemson needs help from its donors to compete in the NIL space.
“The NIL part has been a challenge,” Swinney said. “We need everybody supporting that for sure. It’s what we’ve got to do to compete the way we need to compete.”
Also on Tuesday, Clemson athletic director Graham Neff penned an open letter to donors, urging them to financially support Clemson’s in-house collective, the “110 Society.”
Retroactively dating back to July 1 and moving forward through June 30, 2025, donations to the 110 Society will come with IPTAY incentives from the school’s athletics fundraising arm.
“In the past, 110, you didn’t really have any benefits to give to 110 other than you’re helping us, and that’s been a challenge,” Swinney said. “But we’ve gotta get to (revenue sharing) and we’re competing against a lot of big NIL schools.”
Swinney said he is looking forward to NIL being regulated by a third party once revenue sharing becomes official. He called the current NIL model “just pay for play.”
“We’re kind of in the fourth quarter. We’re in the back 20 percent of insanity and we’ve got some normalcy in this new world coming, but rev share doesn’t start until July 1,” he said. “And so right now it’s just wacky land. You can do anything you want. It doesn’t even have to make any sense. There’s no standard.
“What they’re doing at the university is gonna allow us to do what we need to do until we can get to rev share. … It’s the only way we’re gonna be able to compete between now and July. It’s gonna be important.”
Roster limits
Starting with the 2025-26 academic year, rosters are expected to be capped at 105 players under the House settlement. This is more than the 85 scholarships that programs can offer now, but capping the size of a roster could hurt programs that utilize walk-ons, who are often crucial for developmental and depth purposes.
Swinney said last week that roster limits, which will force programs to cut players, is “the worst thing” he has seen in his coaching career. On Tuesday, he urged decision-makers to use common sense when ironing out the specifics.
“Hopefully we don’t have to cut to 105 … until the first game,” he said. “At least then, you can have plenty of people that can practice.”
Swinney said his hope is that if players get hurt, teams would be allowed to replace them with members of the student body (who previously would have been walk-ons). Last season, Clemson called Jonathan Weitz out of retirement when the Tigers needed to make a switch at kicker. Weitz was still an active student at the time, pursuing an online master’s degree. Swinney wondered aloud if that sort of roster move would be possible in the future.
“We don’t have access to any players,” Swinney said. “In the NFL … if you lose a guy, you just go get a guy off somebody’s practice squad and bring them in.
“At a minimum, if we’re gonna be (at) 105, we need to be able to stay there. If you lose a guy you should be able to add somebody, whether it’s a practice squad or whatever. …We need some flexibility there. We’re not there yet.”
The transfer portal window
Swinney also voiced his support for the new, even earlier early signing period, which begins on Dec. 4 this year and allows high school prospects to sign financial aid agreements to lock in their spots before the transfer portal opens.
He would, however, like to see a change to the timing of the portal.
“To me there should just be one portal window — it’s in the spring and you’re done with it,” he said. “If we had just a little more common sense we could fix it. But it’s where we are.”
South Carolina implications
Swinney also talked about South Carolina and the national implications surrounding this game. The Gamecocks are 8-3 and have won five consecutive games. Both teams have been ranked in the top 16 of the AP Poll just four times in the series history.
“I think (South Carolina coach) Shane (Beamer) has done an outstanding job — he and his whole staff. They’re playing with a ton of confidence,” Swinney said. “It should be a great game. And I think it’s great for our state and this rivalry (that) it’s the highest-ranked rivalry game in college football this year.
“This one’s got a lot of national noise to it.”
(Photo: Isaiah Vazquez / Getty Images)
