Dabo Swinney Talks Competing Against '$45M' Rosters in NIL Era, Addresses Clemson's 2025 Struggles

Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney provided some clarity on his comments from a week ago, when he said that Notre Dame "prints its own money" as part of a larger conversation about budgets and NIL in college sports.

"That was my comment the other day," he told reporters during the ACC spring meetings on Monday. "All of a sudden I'm getting hate mail from people. We have enough. I was just making a point we never had the same as this school and this school if we met at the middle of the field and compared budgets and alumni bases and total revenues, and 5-stars, recruiting rankings—we'd lose every time. You've got to have enough, and then it's about putting it together. We may not have a $45 million roster like some teams, but we've got enough. We've just got to be good with it. We've got to be strategic."

Swinney didn't shy away from critiquing Clemson's results from last season, however, as the team went 7-6, missed the College Football Playoff and lost the Pinstripe Bowl against Penn State, 22-10.

"It's pretty well documented we grossly underachieved last year. That isn't a news flash," he acknowledged. "We just keep beating that dead horse to death. We're onto the new season. We grossly underachieved and underperformed and did not coach and play to our potential. We've had other seasons where we had nobody drafted and won 10-plus games. That's football. It didn't work last year. If you do this long enough, you can have a year where it just doesn't work. I don't care if you're Roy Williams or Coach K [Mike Krzyzewski] or Dabo Swinney, it doesn't matter. It's what you do moving forward. But I think perspective is important."

Despite the ACC being the weakest of the Power 4 conferences in football at this point, Clemson has just one CFP appearance in the past five seasons and hasn't won a Playoff game since 2019. Swinney's aversion to the transfer portal and the changing landscape NIL has provided plenty of challenges for the program, with questions about whether he can adequately adapt.

So any comments he makes on the topic are going to gain traction, and Clemson's relationship with NIL and the transfer portal will remain a fascinating subject to monitor as the Tigers look to keep pace with college football's power brokers.