On Wednesday afternoon, Clemson athletic director Graham Neff spoke to the media for the introduction into the 2024-2025 athletic season, while looking to the past and forward with his plan for Clemson athletics.
The first launch of Clemson Ventures was announced by Neff on Wednesday, which is affiliated with Clemson Athletics and was mainly focused on the ways that the school can generate revenue throughout the college football world, which he called “dynamic” multiple times. It is essentially a way for the athletic program to find other ways to seek revenue from outside businesses.
“[It’] never been more important for us to continue to generate revenue,” Neff said. “It’s a count of us to continue to move the needle, think creatively and do that in many different ways.”
A private-sector structured addition to Clemson’s athletic department, Clemson Ventures will work in tandem with IPTAY to help seek more opportunities for not only revenue for athletics, but also for NIL opportunities for student athletes. It comes after the House Case settlement in May, which allows schools to directly pay student-athletes.
Clemson Athletics founded Clemson Athletic Properties, or CAPCO a few years back, which allowed for an “in-house” revenue generation by owning their multimedia rights with affiliate organizations. Neff believes that Clemson Ventures is a “2.0” version of CAPCO in terms of “how it affiliates with the university.”
“It’s done taxfully because of the strategy here internally with Clemson and the assets that we own,” Neff explained, “but also, as it is even more incumbent on us to generate revenues, we position ourselves as an athletics department within a changing collegiate landscape and, ultimately, support our student-athletes with resources to the department for our support of them, but also, from a NIL standpoint, directly with them, which we are able to do.”
Graham Neff
While the House Case settlement is one reason why Neff is making the move, another could be to support the increase of scholarships across sports, which came from the July agreement that allowed for almost 60 more scholarships opportunities, mainly in football and baseball. Despite this increase, which could put some athletic programs in trouble due to lack of money, Neff reassured that he does not “intend to alter any sport.”
Another person in the ear of Neff has been football head coach Dabo Swinney, who has been previously frustrated with the new addition of scholarships because it would eliminate the walk-on program. While this may be the case, Neff says that this change to 105 scholarships may not happen until next season because of the offseason transition period.
“How exactly Coach looks to deploy that or transition into that and balance the current roster with recruiting, and quite frankly, part of the difficulty [and] the uncertainty of the number and how you scholarship it is the transition time,” Neff said.
In addition to Swinney’s thoughts on the scholarship increase, Neff is also aware of the reluctivess of the Clemson head coach to use the transfer portal. Despite this, the athletic director speaks about the “roster management” of the squad after the season, which he does so with every coach in the department.
“I couldn’t be more convicted and and supportive of Coach Swinney, a two-time national champion head coach,” he said. “Yeah, we talk about it, but in a supportive way and understanding vision and strategy and how we continue to be adaptable in a changing landscape.”
Graham Neff
One of the more ongoing topics in not only the ACC, but the college football landscape has been the dispute from Clemson and Florida State and their lawsuit against the ACC. When asked, Neff said that he would let the legal team handle the case.
“We, Clemson, are going to be great members of the conference that we are in,” he said. “That’s me [and] that starts with me, but all of our coaches and student athletes in the institution can also be really well-read and engaged nationally, that’s incredibly important.”
When talking about contract extensions, one name that the Tigers were relieved to bring back was Clemson baseball coach Erik Bakich, who was rumored to be in contact with different top programs in the country. However, Neff detailed what occurred that allowed him to bring back Bakich until the 2029-2030 season.
“It was a proactive approach,” he said. “Erik’s name came up last year too, and it will come up again.”
“There is not a better fit for Clemson baseball than Erik Bakich,” he added.
Despite the changing college athletic landscape and with what’s to come, Neff’s plans are both to adapt to the style of the college athletic world and “keeping Clemson, Clemson”, with hopes to have another year of success in Clemson athletics.
