Clemson needs success on the field now for success in recruiting in the future

It is important for Clemson football to get off to a fast start this season, and it doesn’t really have anything to do with this season.

Clemson, of course, wants success in 2022 on the field, as do their fans. The team is hungry to get back to the ACC championship game for an opportunity to claim a conference title and a College Football Playoff berth.

Clemson’s performance in 2022 is just as important for the future as it is to the present. While today’s Tigers are competing on the field, potential future Tigers are watching.

The 2024 cycle of high school recruits, who are preparing for their junior seasons, will be recruited heavily by college programs starting as soon as the 2022 college season ends. Their recruitments will pick up momentum as programs move into the spring & summer when they can host prospects on campus.

The next cycle will be called the Class of 2024 because they are scheduled to graduate from high school in spring 2024. Most of their recruitment will happen during the 2023 calendar. Most of their opinion on any program will be shaped by the 2022 season.

The 2022 season will point the momentum of every program in a certain direction. Teams that find big success will have a positive image to 2024 recruits. Teams that underachieve versus expectations will be perceived as having taken a step back. Teams with head coaches on the hot seat will be seen as having unclear futures. Teams with new head coaches will be seen as starting over (which can sometimes be a good thing). Changes to the coaching staff can be similarly impactful to the perception of the program by recruits.

We have discussed the results of Clemson’s 2021 campaign at length this offseason. Clemson fans understand that the program is on solid ground despite the on-field challenges experienced by the offense last season and the departure of both coordinators following the regular season. Despite this, people who do not closely follow the program saw those two realities and reasoned that the program no longer had upward momentum. The perception by the public at-large was that Clemson was in decline.

I think you can look at the way Clemson’s 2023 recruiting class came together and see how the challenges of the 2021 season impacted it. As you expect, most major programs begin by recruiting the highest-rated recruits first, typically players ranked in the Top 100 of the 247 Composite or by Rivals.com. Clemson made overtures to the top-rated prospects that they felt were good fits, as they have for several seasons.

In recent years, when Clemson was coming off seasons with national championships, playoff victories & conference championships, many of those top recruits expressed interest in the Tigers. No program can expect to get commitments from all their top targets, but Clemson attracted enough interest from their targets that they were included on those prospect’s top fives or top eights. If you want to be a finalist or the winner for top-rated recruits, you must first be in the top teams list. The insiders with 247 or Rivals would often indicate that Clemson wasn’t just a token inclusion; they were serious contenders.

What we observed this past spring was that a lot of those top recruits didn’t reciprocate the interest that Clemson showed in them. Even if Clemson was listed in a top teams list (which can sometimes be as many as ten teams these days), usually the insiders would indicate most of the prospect’s attention was focused on other programs.

I think this dip in success with getting in early on the best recruits is a result of the perception that the program was no longer on the rise due to the results of 2022 and subsequent departures from the staff. Whether the perception was correct or not, I think the recruits just didn’t see Clemson in the same light as prospects from past classes. They eliminated Clemson from their consideration before the coaches really had a chance to sell them on the program.

Quality head coaches and staffs can sometimes mitigate negative perceptions of a program, and Swinney is amongst the best salespeople in the business, as are several of his staff. While Clemson may have missed out on many of the kind of recruits they would pursue in previous years, they were still able to convince several quality prospects to visit Clemson for an official visit during the first week of June. The results of that weekend have been incredibly positive. The Tigers have received fifteen commitments since the beginning of June, and most of them attended the official visit weekend.

I think it is important to point out the staff’s success selling the program to the players that attended the official visit weekend. The challenges of attracting the attention of Top 100 recruits weren’t due to any shortcomings by Coach Swinney or his staff. I believe the challenges were entirely due to perception of the program coming out of the 2021 season.

It is important to note that Clemson does have Top 100 talent (based on the 247 Composite rankings) in the Class of 2022. Peter Woods, Christopher Vizzina, Vic Burley & Harris Sewell are all highly rated recruits that were attracted to the Tigers this spring. Compare four Top 100 players in this class to the past five classes, and you will see that in three cycles (2018, 2020 & 2021), Clemson got commitments from at least seven Top 100 prospects. In 2020, they had ten Top 100 commitments.

Don’t forget that Clemson had six Top 100 verbal commitments for the Class of 2022 when the 2021 season started. By the time the season ended, and Coach Venables left, three of them had de-committed. They were attracted when the perception of the program was consistent, but lost interest when the perception dipped. At least one of them was already visiting other programs before Venables took the head coaching job at Oklahoma.

Clemson football is recruiting well in the 2023 cycle, but not as strong as in previous years

These comparisons help illustrate that while the Class of 2023 is very good, and will likely finish as a Top 10 class, it isn’t as strong at the top as most recent classes. This is how I think the perceptions created by the 2021 season impacted the Class of 2023.

Can you imagine how successful the June official weekend could have been if more Top 100 prospects had been willing to keep Clemson on their radars through the spring, instead of focusing on other programs they perceived to be in a better position?

This brings me back to my original point: if Clemson can get off to a fast start in 2022 and put the team back in the playoff conversation for this season, it can change perceptions of the program immediately. It quickly sends the message that 2021 was a very small bump in the road and that the revamped staff is very capable of keeping the program at an elite level. The Tigers don’t have to win a championship, they just need to show that the program is still trending upward.

A successful 2022 season can lead to positive momentum in spring 2023 for recruiting, which coupled with another summer official visit weekend can lead to a very talented Class of 2024 for Clemson.