Tampering has become the NCAA transfer portal’s open secret, and Clemson coach Dabo Swinney is saying the quiet part out loud.
It matters because the sport can’t claim it has “rules” around transfers if the biggest decisions are still being made before athletes are even allowed to be recruited.
Tampering is the gap between the rulebook and reality
The NCAA’s basic line is straightforward: coaches and staff aren’t supposed to recruit a player at another school until that player is officially in the portal.
In practice, the market often moves earlier than the paperwork.
When programs talk about “doing their homework” or “monitoring situations,” they’re describing a system where information travels fast and accountability travels slow.
How the portal turned into a pre-portal marketplace
The portal was built to create order: a centralized mechanism that lets athletes explore options and lets schools recruit them within defined windows.
The unintended consequence is that the portal has become the final step, not the first.
Agents, handlers, and third-party intermediaries have more influence than ever, and the timing incentives are obvious: if a player can line up an offer before entering, the public “decision” becomes a formality.
Swinney’s message: Clemson won’t play that game
Swinney has framed Clemson’s approach as a choice: follow the rules, even if it costs you leverage.
“There’s still a lot of tampering going on,” Swinney said, describing the way programs learn who is “going to enter the portal” before it happens. “I know that people are having those conversations and eating and cutting deals. Not us.” He added, “We’re going to do what’s right.”
That’s not just a moral stance. It’s an indictment of competitive balance when rule-following is treated like a self-imposed handicap.
The NCAA’s enforcement problem is right there in the record
Tampering is not a theoretical violation. The NCAA has documented cases where contact happened before portal entry, including direct communication initiated by a head coach.
And yet the larger reality remains: high-profile roster movement routinely appears coordinated, fast, and too clean to be purely spontaneous.
If the sport wants to keep calling this “player freedom,” it has to admit the current structure often turns freedom into pressure — pressure to decide quickly, pressure to chase the best bid, pressure to accept a path laid out before the portal even opens.
The calendar crunch makes the behavior predictable
Swinney’s broader concern ties to timing: the transfer windows and the postseason now overlap in ways that force decisions while teams are still playing.
He has argued the current setup risks creating situations where players miss meaningful team moments because roster math and portal timing demand a choice now, not later.
A shorter window was supposed to reduce chaos. It may simply concentrate it — turning a month of movement into a sprint where everyone is incentivized to get ahead of the rules.
The incentives are upside down
The sport says tampering is prohibited, but it rewards the outcomes that tampering produces: early commitments, roster certainty, and an advantage in bidding for impact talent.
That’s why the debate keeps circling back to the same question: What is the NCAA actually trying to regulate — contact, money, timing, or all of it?
If the goal is competitive fairness, then the enforcement has to be consistent enough that “we don’t tamper” isn’t a competitive disadvantage.
If the goal is optics, then the sport will keep pretending surprise announcements are surprise announcements.
What changes would actually matter
There are only a few paths out of this loop:
1) Define the violation in a way that matches modern reality.
If indirect contact through “associated individuals” counts, that standard has to be enforceable, not symbolic.
2) Increase individual accountability.
Penalties that follow decision-makers matter more than penalties that land on athletes or the next coaching staff.
3) Fix the incentives in the calendar.
A system that forces roster decisions during postseason play guarantees backchannel behavior. Move the decision points, and you reduce the reasons to jump the line.
Swinney’s argument is essentially that the sport needs a cooling-off period — not because coaches want less player movement, but because the current structure encourages the most aggressive actors to operate in the gray.
The uncomfortable truth: everyone knows what’s happening
The reason Swinney’s quotes resonate is that they match what roster-building looks like in real time.
Commitments can be announced within hours of portal entry. Visits appear to be planned before eligibility to recruit. “Fits” feel pre-identified.
None of that proves wrongdoing in any single case. It does show how normalized the pre-portal marketplace has become.
The sport doesn’t have to choose between player movement and integrity. It does have to choose whether rules are real or decorative.
Swinney, for his part, is betting Clemson can win while keeping the line bright.
The rest of college football keeps testing whether the line exists at all.