Dabo Swinney Roster Complaint: 105 Players NOT Enough
College football coaches love to complain. They complain about the refs, their opponents, and the fans. The biggest complaint college football coaches have in 2024, is they don't like that times are changing. Nothing stays the same, except for their belly-aching.
Clemson head football coach Dabo Swinney is the perfect example of this. Since the growth of the player transfer portal, along with the NIL, Swinney has not had the same kind of success he was having just five years ago. As a result, and to nobody's surprise, he hates the transfer portal and he hates the NIL.
Swinney says the hate he has isn't about how it's taken away from his winning ways, but rather, he hates to see players getting paid. "I'm not against the NIL at all," he said on The Players Club Podcast in 2022. "What I am against is anything that devalues education. That's what I'm against, and I'm against the professionalization of college athletics.."
This was around the same time that Swinney inked a 10-year, $115 million deal to be the Tigers coach through 2032. He believed that it was OK for coaches to make nine figures off the blood, sweat, and tears of teenage boys, so long as those boys didn't get any money. It may be an oversimplification, but it sounds like he is a southern white man who has no problem making a fortune by utilizing free labor.
Dabo Swinney Roster Complaint
Collegiate sports are becoming professional sports, but it's been a long time coming. College athletics generates billions of dollars in revenue and has for ages. A great number of athletic directors and coaches swam through the money like Scrooge McDuck, while the players (or laborers) collected nothing.
A House committee pending ruling, in response to the changing times, is Swinney's newest gripe. A bill is going to be passed, likely in the spring of 2025, that will limit college football rosters to 105 players. It will also, most likely end the existence of walk-on players, by increasing the number of scholarships a school can offer, from 85 to 105.
A former Alabama walk-on himself, Swinney called this decision the worst thing in his coaching career. Clemson currently has 136 players on its roster. 19 of them are seniors and will be graduating, but Swinney has an incoming freshman class of 22, meaning the Dabo Swinney roster for 2025 is currently 139 players.
Swinney says he dreads the inevitability of cutting players to get to the cap. The cuts will most likely be from his walk-on players, of which he has 50. Speaking to the media, he had this to say;
“It’s very simple, first of all you know who definitely has to leave so that makes it easy and basically anybody that’s a fourth-year that you know you’re not coming back — obviously we have to cut a lot of guys this year,” Swinney said. “It’s terrible. It’s the worst thing in my whole coaching career … but we’ve gotta cut a bunch of kids that have been in our program. I’ve given all of them an option if they are a fourth-year then they have the option to be honored as a senior. They’ve earned that. And some of these kids would be back for their fifth year next year and they’re not going to have the opportunity to do that and that’s sad. That’s the way it is.”
It's laughable to think that NFL coaches and general managers can field a 53-man roster to play 17 games, but colleges would have a hard time playing 12 games with double that amount. Understandably, it's different for colleges. If a player gets hurt, they can't just sign a free agent to fill the spot. They have to use players who are already on the roster.
How much depth does a team need though? Clemson has four kickers and four punters on their roster. Those aren't positions that deal with much attrition. The team has 15 safeties. Even a prevent defense won't use more than five at once.
Every college team is heavy on the roster front, but Swinney should look to a school like Indiana for a blueprint. They are undefeated this season (Clemson is 8-2) despite having 22 fewer players than Clemson. The ruling is going to create nearly 1,500 scholarships in just the Power 5, and spread talent more evenly across Division I football. Swinney doesn't get it, but change is not the bad guy. Apparently failing to adapt to change, though, is a reason to complain.