In July 2021, the conference’s head coaches gathered in a hotel conference room in Uptown Charlotte, one day before the ACC’s football media days, to hear a presentation.
Then-Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick, who had been assigned to explain the newly expanded College Football Playoff to the group, stood before them. For more than an hour, Swarbrick described the 12-team format, with the same team starting for the first time this weekend.
As his presentation ended, Swarbrick looked around the room and saw disturbing expressions.
They hated it.
Most of the haters? Clemson coach Dabo Swinney.
“At one point I had to say to them, ‘Look, guys, I’m just passing the information on to you,’” Swarbrick recalls.
More than three years later, days before the first round of the postseason, Swinney and his Tigers in particular are benefiting from the expanded format he so roundly criticized. Clemson, as the 12th seed of the 12-team field, won the ACC championship game and secured the fifth and final automatic qualifying spot designated for conference champions.
And yet Swinney regrets nothing. He stands by his previous comments: Expansion is turning college football into something he never wanted to see.
“It’s what I thought it would be,” he told Yahoo Sports in an interview earlier this month. “What I liked about the old way is I thought college football was unique. And now it’s just like everything else. It’s just like the pros.”
He has a point, of course.
Even the staunchest proponents of an expanded playoff acknowledge that the new postseason puts college football one step closer to matching its big brother. It represents one of many steps in the industry’s well-documented march toward professionalism.
In July, for example, schools will be allowed to pay players directly. They sign contracts, some even with buyouts, and many of them negotiate through agents. Schools are hiring NFL coaches and front office managers to operate in this new professional world.
Heck, college football even adopts the rules of the game from its professional counterpart. This year the sport added a two-minute warning.
“It seems like college football is looking more like pro football right now,” new North Carolina coach Bill Belichick acknowledged in an interview with Pat McAfee last week.
The pro-like changes have significant implications for the sector. Whether they are positive or negative is up for debate. But one thing is clear: For the first time in years, if not ever, there is equality in the game – another important part of the NFL.
That parity? It is a result, coaches and administrators believe, that players have freedom of movement.
Even Swinney believes this to be true.
“What is the most important position in football? Quarterback. Everybody has the opportunity to get a quarterback,” Swinney said. “These kids don’t sit down. Or the kids have played really well and they have an opportunity to move somewhere else, and financially it’s a no-brainer for them. You can go from inexperienced quarterback to great quarterback in no time. That is a game-changer for many programs.”
Five of the 12 playoff teams have a freshman quarterback. Dillon Gabriel, at his third school, leads Oregon to the playoffs on top after playing at Oklahoma last year. Sam Leavitt, QB for Arizona State, started his career at Michigan State.
Eighth-seeded Ohio State starts Will Howard a year after he threw 24 touchdowns for Kansas State, and Indiana’s quarterback, Kurtis Rourke, played in the Mid-American Conference last season. Finally, there’s Notre Dame, who plucked Riley Leonard from Duke in the offseason.
That ignores perhaps the main beneficiary of any playoff team’s portal: SMU.
The Mustangs are a shining example of this new age model. They lured backups and role players from more historic football powers and put them in position as starters.
Brashard Smith, the team’s top running back, is a former four-star player who played receiver behind Hurricanes star Xavier Restrepo at Miami. Starting tight end Matthew Hibner played in a reserve role last year at Michigan.
Major college transfers make up SMU’s entire defensive front, a front that Swinney describes as “the biggest D-line we’ve played this year.” Two are from Miami, one from Arkansas and one from Georgia.
‘That wasn’t the case the boys at their senior school,” SMU coach Rhett Lashlee said. “Those schools didn’t want them to leave, but they had the opportunity to make an impact.”
With the new transfer rules, Lashlee argues that college football’s blue bloods can no longer “charge up, create a monopoly and dominate over and over again,” he says. Players, who were previously limited to one school and punished for transferring, can now move freely. They leave school to get a job and, in some cases, a higher salary.
“They move so they can play and the talent becomes more spread out,” Lashlee said.
Kind of like free agency in… the NFL, right?
Except, of course, that in college there is no employment or collective bargaining and, at least at the moment, no enforceable, binding contracts. Perhaps these are the main differences that still exist between the two.
“When (Lashlee) got there, they didn’t have staff like they do now,” Swinney said. “He won’t have time to build it through high school recruiting. You now have the opportunity to go get guys.
SMU isn’t alone in building its roster to find the promised land for the playoffs. At Indiana, first-year coach Curt Cignetti built a team largely of transfers from the Group of Five level, many from his former school, James Madison.
IU’s top four tacklers are freshman transfers. That includes the top four rushers and the top four receivers. His leader in sacks is a transfer, Mikail Kamara, and his long snapper is also a transfer.
IU’s transfers – 22 in total – call themselves the “Group of Five All-Stars.” They meet Notre Dame Friday night in South Bend with reminders of preseason Big Ten projections. The Hoosiers were picked 17th out of 18 teams.
“They said we had too many Group of Five players,” Aiden Fisher, IU’s star linebacker, said earlier this season.
The No. 1 team in the country is also filled with portal guys, many from the SEC. Two of Oregon’s top three receivers are from Texas A&M and Alabama, the next best tackler is from Ole Miss and Jordan Burch, second in sacks, played at South Carolina.
Ohio State’s portal draft was one of the most highly regarded in the country, with many also coming from the SEC, including safety Caleb Downs and running back Quinshon Judkins.
One playoff team almost completely devoid of transfers? Clemson, the only non-military academy not to accept a transfer last cycle – a long-standing staple of the program under Swinney.
But in this pro-style world, even that is changing.
Clemson signed its first non-quarterback transfer in six years on Monday with Southeast Missouri State wide receiver Tristan Smith. The move sent shockwaves through the college football world. Swinney has resisted accepting transfers for years, pointing to the fact that his program doesn’t have many “holes” to fill.
Clemson doesn’t let many players leave, and Swinney has often said he’s against pushing them away.
Unfortunately, he finally found a spot for an FCS wideout. Will it open the floodgates? Unlikely.
“We’re not looking for a lot of these guys, but if you have a hole, I don’t care who you are, you can go and fill it,” he said. “That’s an equalizer.”
The new NFL-like parity of college football will be on display this weekend. What unfolds over the next month is very much a pro-style playoff, as Swinney claims. There are first round byes, home games and wintry weather.
But it’s not all bad, he eventually admits.
“It has created more opportunities and it will continue to (expand), but it has only shifted the focus to the play-offs. It’s all about the play-off. That’s probably not a bad thing,” he said.
But like the NFL, fans should prepare for more losses, given the nature of equality. Everyone needs to be more patient than ever before, Swinney says.
“There won’t be many undefeated teams,” he said. “Just a few years ago, the Chiefs made the wild card and made it to the Super Bowl. When they stood up and held up the trophy, they didn’t say, “But you all had a really bad season!” That’s where we’re going. It’s just going to be more like the NFL in terms of mentality and psyche.”
Could Clemson be college football’s version of the wildcard Chiefs? They were the last team in the field and have suffered three defeats this season, two of them on a big scale. Can they knock off the Longhorns and then beat the Sun Devils in the Peach Bowl quarterfinals? How would they do in a semifinal against Oregon, Ohio State or Tennessee?
Brace yourself, says Swinney: the play-off changes aren’t over yet and Super League is also just around the corner. “It will grow to 14 or 16 teams and the whole thing will be restructured.”
