Clemson football: Alumni in NFL week one not among college football best

As elite as Clemson football has been over the last five years, it doesn’t mean success at the NFL level.

Clemson football head coach Dabo Swinney is in the winning college football games business. Like every other college football head coach, he is not in the making players into NFL stars business. Yes, it is good for business to have NFL players since every high school star aspires to that level, but the current number of former Clemson players on NFL rosters isn’t equal to success in college.

The Athletics’ Bruce Feldman recently tweeted out a list of college football programs that had the most talent on active NFL rosters in week one of the NFL season and Clemson was a lot lower on this list than some may have imagined.

To no one’s surprise, Alabama was number one with 53 total players on week one active rosters; Ohio State, LSU, Florida, and Michigan round out the top five.

The University of Georgia, Penn State, Miami, Notre Dame, and Oklahoma all come in at six through 10. You won’t find Clemson football until you get to 13th overall. Week one on active NFL rosters, just 28 former Tigers were found. Both Iowa and Stanford had just as 28 players on NFL rosters as well.

There are two ways to look at this information as far as Clemson football is concerned.

One, Clemson football has 69 wins, five ACC titles, five college football appearances, four national title games, and two national titles while not having nearly the same amount of elite NFL talent as other programs in the country.

This just shows how elite the Clemson football coaching staff is when it comes to developing the talent that they sign. This goes to show that the recruiting philosophy that Dabo Swinney employs of recruiting great young men first is more important than recruiting elite athletes.

Recruiting young men with insatiable work ethics that buy into what your program does every day means more to college success than just simply recruiting high-level talent. Sometimes those high-level talented guys are also the elite level young men off the field.

The other way to interpret this information is the way that those that recruit against Clemson will spin – don’t go to Clemson if your only goal is to get to the NFL. We have seen this before. It is the exact pitch that former Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer used to try and keep Carman Jackson at home.

He told Carman verbatim that Clemson had never produced a first-round NFL talent on the offensive line, which is still correct. Carman was able to see all that Clemson football offers and responded with he would change that, this is where being elite off the field comes in for those that Clemson offers.

There is no doubt that over the next five years that Clemson football alumni will exponentially increase as the Tigers continue to dominate college football like no program ever has.