Clemson football: The times, are they A’ changin’?

As Clemson shifts recruiting strategy, some question decision.

Clemson football head coach Dabo Swinney has been accused of many things, one of them being a dinosaur when it comes to recruiting, especially official visits.

The narrative that he won’t recruit the portal (false, he just doesn’t do it in the fashion most do) and he’s against NIL (false, many of his players have deals and there are at least two collectives tied to Clemson) have proven to be not true, but now it appears Swinney is changing a long held tenet of his recruiting strategy, the no official visits in the summer policy.

If you’ve been on social media the last couple of days you have no doubt seen a gaggle of recruits letting the world know they’ll be in Clemson this weekend, so it’s hard to say that Dabo has “quietly” changed his philosophy.

"And while Swinney might still be opposed to bringing in veterans to supplement roster holes, this upcoming weekend’s visitors list signals that Swinney might actually have a new outlook on how he wants to handle recruiting moving forward as for the first time ever, the Tigers will welcome prospects to campus for summer official visits. And it’s not just one or two visitors. No, try 30."

But, as national writers are wont to do, they can’t write an article about Dabo without questioning his decision, even if it’s a decision they’ve been blasting him for not making.

"Is it the right move? Well, one could certainly make the case that summer official visits are of the high-risk, high-reward variety and not exactly as lucrative as some would think."

Dabo Swinney recruiting strategy questioned, no matter what decision he makes

OK, so when Dabo doesn’t host summer official visits it’s bad and if he does host summer officials, well, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be because of what Florida and Texas ultimately ended up getting from their summer visitors. Mensa is waiting for this guys app.

This genius thinks it’s a “bad” thing that Texas got commitments from “a middling” 17 recruits they had in over the summer in the last cycle.  Seriously?  I don’t know how many commits Texas already had at that time, but considering the 25 limit (generally) at the time and you come to realize that maybe they couldn’t take everyone who wanted to commit of the group.  Even if the Longhorns had 0 commits at the time, getting 68% of your class to eventually commit (out of 38 visitors) is not a bad thing.

I’ll be the first to say it – Clemson will not get 30 commitments weekend, so no doubt somebody, somewhere will label it a failure.

This is literal proof that no matter what Dabo does, he’ll be criticized for both changing and not changing, sometimes within the same article.