Many college football fans know Clemson football head coach Dabo Swinney for his different view on the transfer portal and love for building his squad with his recruits and homegrown talent. However, with the NCAA’s expansion of the scholarship limit, he is not a fan of the amount of players he will have to roster in the future.
At ACC Media Day on Thursday in Charlotte, Swinney was asked about the change to the NCAA’s scholarship limit, where a Wednesday report declared that football programs across the country would be granted 20 more scholarship spots, going to 105 instead of 85 players.
With that, it most likely says goodbye to many walk-on programs across the country, which is something that Swinney enjoys about coaching his football program. He also believes that many other coaches agree with his standpoint.
“The crazy thing is there are not many coaches that want 105 scholarships,” he said. “We want to keep our walk-ons. It’s hard to manage that many guys and when you have that many guys on scholarships.”
Swinney understands that it is a law passed under the House, meaning that everything was considered, but the setback in all of this was the elimination of the walk-on players and the program.
“The unintended consequence is, basically, it eliminates your walk ons, and there’s no coach that wants that,” he said. It’s a really sad thing to me. Yeah, great, we get more scholarships, that’s awesome, but our game is just different.”
Head Coach Dabo Swinney
The Clemson head coach respects this group of players for their versatility on scout teams, which helps the Tigers prepare for opponents throughout weeks. Being very tough to replace, according to Swinney, he details the loss as “dwindling.”
“When you don’t have scout teams, to be able to present the looks, it’s really difficult,” he said. “It’s a challenge, for sure, and we will figure it out.”
Coach Swinney
“It’s a complicated game,” he added. “You may have a ‘yeah, maybe that corner can, physically, go play running back,’ but he [doesn’t] know what to do. It’s not like they all sit in the same meetings and learn the same terminology, it’s not that simple.”
Swinney related it to the NFL, where franchises can pick up players off the practice squad in order to serve as players on the scout team or add them to the 53-man roster throughout the season. With the addition of this new law, the Clemson head coach believes that this idea is taken away in college, leaving more conflicts for the future.
“It’s a different type of preparation in college,” he said, “and now, when you do away with the walk-ons and the guys that want to be a part of it and serve, that 105 is going to dwindle. We have no way to practice.”
“There were teams last year that played bowl games that if this rule was in effect, they would’ve had to forfeit the bowl game,” Swinney added.
A coach who has been very vocal about issues throughout his time at Clemson, Swinney believes that all college football head coaches are facing the same problem, and all will have to pivot into different choices to fill these voids.
“We can keep our 120, which all coaches want, but everyone has to be on scholarship, which is obviously a problem,” he said. “So, everybody has been trying to figure out, ‘how can we best make it work?’”
Another issue he believes will arise in the future is the exponential rise of the transfer portal due to teams only allowing a certain number of players traveling, which will affect play time to those on scholarship.
“I think you will see that transfer number go way up, because you only travel about 80,” he said. “So, there will be a lot of football players not getting to play.”
An avid supporter of the walk-on program and having seen some of his players succeed through it, Swinney used his time to defend this program, as it proves to be more important to a team’s success than what most people think.
The walk-on program is what disappoints me the most,” he said. “It saddens me that it is probably going to go away.”
