Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney is ready to move past the headlines, but he isn’t willing to stop the conversation. Before heading into the Tigers’ spring practice slate, Swinney explained that his recent public position concerning transfer portal tampering (i.e., a high-profile dispute between linebacker Luke Ferrelli and Ole Miss) was not part of a personal vendetta.
“And, yeah, I mean, it is what it is,” Swinney said Wednesday. “There’s, I think, if nothing else, at least we’ve sparked a lot of conversation.” Yeah, it’s not, it’s not about a player or anything like that."
The controversy sparked in January when Swinney shared a timeline of allegedly “blatant tampering” by Ole Miss personnel while Ferrelli was already enrolled in classes at Clemson. But while the story was a national college football phenomenon, Swinney maintains the intent was systemic change, not individual punishment.
“It’s really just about, like, what can we, what can and can’t do, just trying to create some clarity on what that is,” Swinney said. “But, you know, we’ll see — it’s not about getting people in trouble. It’s about like, what can we and can’t do.”
As the NCAA moves toward a new era of revenue sharing and evolving portal windows, Swinney mentioned a number of "gray areas" that continue to frustrate coaching personnel in all corners of the nation. He wondered about not having hard limits on how often a player moved freely between the portal and a roster.
“How many times can you go in and out of the portal in a two-week period? You know? Can you? Can you go in three times and you sign with three schools?" Swinney asked. “There’s just a lot of things that we need to get some answers from a coaching standpoint, and some things that we got to do better from a coaching standpoint.”
While the NCAA recently released a memo to member schools offering “significant penalties” for tampering violations, a move many viewed as a direct response to Clemson’s formal complaint, Swinney did not provide any more information about the status of the Ferrelli case.
“I think everybody understands that, but there’s no update or anything like that,” Swinney concluded.
The Tigers are focusing their attention elsewhere now, but Swinney’s “spark” — as it were — has clearly set the national governing body on fire, paving the way for that very point when the lines of the modern recruiting era cease to be blurred.