DEPRESSING NEWS Dabo Swinney of Clemson on upcoming revenue sharing and player compensation: “I love it.”
DISCOURAGING NEWS:
When Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney addressed the platform Tuesday to talk about NIL benefits and colleges being allowed to pay players for the next season, his tone was very different from previous years.
When Swinney talked about athletes getting paid, he sounded like a totally different coach than he had in the past, according to Grace Raynor of The Athletic. Swinney expressed delight that the Tigers will be able to pay players directly starting next season.
Nobody will be wealthier than Clemson. “For the first time ever, nobody,” Swinney remarked, referring to the upcoming income sharing scheme. That will be beneficial.
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The House case settlement allows school athletic departments to give athletes up to 22% of their broadcast earnings. This implies that Clemson will have $20.5 million to distribute among its many sports, with football probably receiving the largest share.
At Clemson, we’ve always had the money. Swinney stated, “We simply haven’t been able to share it.” “And we can now.”
Swinney, who used to be one of the most vocal coaches opposed the idea of paying athletes, has completely changed his mind on this issue.
Dabo’s position on NIL and players receiving money was considerably more unfavorable in 2014.
According to USA Today, Swinney stated, “We try to teach our guys, use football to create the opportunities, take advantage of the platform and the brand and the marketing you have available to you.” “However, I disagree with the idea of professionalizing collegiate athletics and compensating athletes. There is already enough entitlement in this world, so I’ll go do something else.
The coach attempted to argue on Tuesday that his position was not about compensating players but rather about colleges eliminating the intellectual components of being a collegiate athlete, which was never a possibility.
What has changed for Swinney over the past ten years, then? mostly the college athletics scene. The concept of colleges paying players directly was still seven years off in 2014, and it was still a fantasy. Clemson had just finished their third consecutive season with ten or more wins and was poised to qualify for the playoffs for the first time; Swinney was a coach on the rise. Swinney could rant about the perils of the transfer portal and how he could pay players anything he wanted without worrying about the repercussions.
Now, though? Things appear extremely different now. Players are receiving a portion of the money they are due, and NIL is here to stay. Because of that and the transfer portal, the sport has completely changed, allowing players to look for better opportunities elsewhere whenever they choose.
For Swinney and the Tigers, too, things have changed, and not in a good way. The Tigers haven’t qualified for the playoffs in four years, and they concluded last year far from the conversation. The Tigers will probably need a lot of assistance to qualify even this season because of their losses to Louisville and Georgia as well as their lack of noteworthy victories.
Though they don’t have the players to compete with the Georgias, Alabamas, and Ohio States of the globe, Swinney’s teams are nonetheless competitive in the ACC. The odds are favorable because they haven’t produced a top-five recruiting class since 2021 and have only made it into the top 10 once, in 2022. The main causes of their decline are Swinney’s hesitation to pay players and his use of the transfer site to boost his lineup.
In other words, it should not be surprising that Swinney is attempting to convey that he has always supported paying players and is eager to pay you to play for them, whether you are a transfer portal acquisition or a prospective Clemson recruit. This is because there are now real repercussions for continuing to oppose paying players.
Will his change of heart be sufficient to stop the team’s decline from a national powerhouse to a nine-to-10-win squad that is in the running for a postseason berth but not a championship?
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