Clemson Athletics: We can’t trust everything we hear

The Spring Game is in the books. Despite the divergent opinions regarding the quality of play, the weekend was a success for Clemson Athletics, as the baseball team won their series against Notre Dame, and the softball team also won their series at NC State.

It’s not unusual for some bizarre news bites to pop up during a weekend like this. Sometimes it’s recruiting. Sometimes it’s transfer portal. Who knows what might pop up?

This weekend the bizarre “news” was this tweet.

If you’ve read my contributions to Rubbing The Rock, you know I was critical of Neff following the conclusion of the Clemson Men’s Basketball season.

That said, I just don’t see how this claim can be true.

To be clear, I am not an insider. I don’t know, nor have ever spoken to, Graham Neff or Marc Ryan. I met Brad Brownell once and took a picture with him in 2010. That’s the extent of my personal knowledge here.

We can see based on the picture included in the tweet that Ryan did have a meeting with Neff, but a still shot is hardly evidence of the conversation that might have occurred.

What I have observed from Neff over his time as athletic director is that he conducts himself with professionalism. If Neff actually had the conversation Ryan claims he had, it would be the most unprofessional thing I have ever heard an athletic director say on the record. It would be the most unprofessional manner of delivering such a message to an athletic director’s fanbase.

On the other hand, I have heard/seen Ryan called out by peers and people in athletics administration for questionable reporting at least a few times now.

This past winter Ryan claimed South Carolina coach Shane Beamer was trying to hire Garrett Riley as offensive coordinator before they ultimately hired Dowell Loggains. Riley would eventually accept Clemson’s coordinator position.

While this is ultimately a “his word against mine” situation, Beamer challenged Ryan’s source for the information, suggesting that unless the source was Beamer himself, it was unreliable. Ryan deflected by saying Beamer should make himself available for a conversation on the subject, instead of defending the source of his information for making the claim in the first place.

Ryan also once claimed to have inside information on discussions within the SEC regarding Clemson and Florida State. This claim was called unfounded by multiple people in the sports talk industry throughout the state.

It is important to acknowledge that no one has provided proof that Ryan’s claims were falsified. Neff hasn’t refuted this weekend’s tweet. Beamer can’t prove his claim that Riley wasn’t higher on his wishlist than Loggains. No one from the SEC has addressed Ryan’s claims to state they were false.

The most frustrating thing for objective fans is that everybody here has some sort of plausible deniability. Do we know the truth? No, we aren’t insiders. We weren’t there.

We do have common sense, and there are a couple of points that stand out to me.

First, we have to acknowledge history. There is a trend of Ryan making claims that either seem very unrealistic, have been directly refuted by a person involved in the claim, or at the very least seem far above Ryan’s capability to source as a radio host in the upstate of South Carolina. He isn’t on the Clemson or South Carolina beat.

Second, most reports that do turn out to be accurate don’t come from a single source. All reports have to be broken by somebody, but the true reports are usually followed up by several other credible people with sources who corroborate the claim. We haven’t seen this in any of the situations described thus far.

This applies to some other claims being made on social media right now that involve Clemson. Another member of the sports radio community, Greg Swaim, has been tweeting a lot of scoops on the ongoing conference realignment debate, several of which directly involve Clemson and the ACC.

Some claims about Clemson Athletics need to be taken with a grain of salt

I would love to believe that Clemson has a move to one of the Big Two conferences in its short-term future, and I think a lot of Clemson fans share my perspective. The hesitance for me to believe these reports is fueled by two of the same factors impacting my reluctance to believe Ryan’s claims: these scoops seem above Swaim’s head, and no one is corroborating his claims.

Do I know that Ryan or Swaim are making false claims? No, I don’t, and it is important to note that.

Am I capable of exercising common sense judgement about such claims? I am, and even though I would love to believe that Brownell is teetering on the edge of losing his job, and I would love to believe Clemson is on the verge of joining one of the Big Two, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all to know Beamer had a private wish list that had Riley at the top, I know the circumstances surrounding these claims are suspect at best.

I don’t need to be an insider to believe these claims by Ryan and Swaim are nothing more than attempts to get attention and get wider audiences than they have been able to achieve thus far.

As fans, we just can’t believe everything we hear or read, even if we might want to believe it.