Clemson's Dabo Swinney on impending revenue sharing, paying players: 'I love it'
Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney took to the podium on Tuesday to discuss NIL benefits and schools being permitted to pay players next season, and his tone was drastically different than it's been in years past.
According to Grace Raynor of The Athletic, Swinney sounded like a completely different coach than he had previously when discussing athletes getting paid, expressing excitement that the Tigers would be able to pay players directly starting next season.
“Nobody’s gonna have more money than Clemson. Nobody,” Swinney said, referencing the impending revenue sharing model, “For the first time ever. That’ll be good.”
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With the settlement of the House lawsuit, school athletic departments can share up to 22 percent of their television revenue with players. In Clemson's case, that means the school will have $20.5 million to divvy up amongst its various sports, with football likely to get the biggest chunk of that pie.
“We’ve always had the money at Clemson. We just haven’t been able to share it,” Swinney said. “And now we can.”
This stance is a full about-face for Swinney, who was one of the most outspoken coaches at the prospect of paying players in the past.
In 2014, Dabo's stance on NIL and players getting revenue was much more negative.
“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," Swinney said, per USA Today. "But as far as paying players, professionalizing college athletics, that's where you lose me. I’ll go do something else, because there's enough entitlement in this world as it is.”
On Tuesday, the coach tried to claim his stance wasn't about paying players, but about schools removing the academic aspects of being a college athlete, which was never something that was on the table.
So what changed in the last 10 years for Swinney? The landscape of college sports, mostly. In 2014, NIL money was still seven years off, and the idea of schools paying players directly was little more than a pipe dream. Swinney was a coach on the rise; Clemson was fresh off their third-straight 10-plus win season and on the verge of making the Playoff for the first time. Swinney could rail against the dangers of the transfer portal and paying players all he wanted without fear of consequence.
But now? Now things look very different. NIL is here to stay, and players are getting a chunk of the money they deserve. That and the transfer portal have reshaped the sport from the ground up, giving players the ability to seek greener pastures elsewhere anytime they like.
Times have changed for Swinney and the Tigers, too, and not for the better. It's been four years since the Tigers last made the playoff, and they finished last year well outside the conversation to get in. Even this year, thanks to losses to Louisville and Georgia and a dearth of quality wins, the Tigers are likely going to need a heap of help to make the field.
Swinney's teams are still competitive in the ACC, but they lack the athletes to hang with the Georgias, Alabamas and Ohio States of the world. They haven't had a top-five recruiting class since 2021, and have cracked the top 10 just once, in 2022, and odds are good Swinney's reticence about paying players and using the transfer portal to bolster his roster are big reasons for their dip.
In other words, now that there are tangible consequences for continuing to oppose paying players, it should come as no surprise that Swinney is trying to make it seem like he was always in favor of it, and can't wait to pay you to play for them, future Clemson recruit or transfer portal acquisition.
The question is, will his change of heart be enough to help stem the slide from national powerhouse to nine-to-10-win team who contends for a playoff berth, but not a title?
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