Continuing his diatribe against college football’s lack of regulation within the transfer portal and furthering an opinion offered by most coaches, Clemson’s Dabo Swinney shredded the current model recently and said he expects change to come soon thanks to fallout from the looming House v. NCAA settlement.
Swinney wants transfer portal reform, along with stricter NIL guidelines and how uncontrolled free agency operates within college football.
“There are no rules right now,” Swinney said on “The College GameDay Podcast.” “We just want some rules. And I think we’re coming out of a period of complete chaos and where there’s no cap, the schools can’t handle things directly. It comes from outside entities. You have the agent process is not regulated. I mean, there’s a lot of challenges, but I do think that we’re about to enter into a much more structured environment that is going to … it might take a year.
“But I think it’s going to create some markets, you know, to where there’ll be some transparency, there’s an actual cap. I think the best thing about the settlement is it keeps college football scholastic.”
Swinney said college football will likely move to a salary cap of sorts akin to the NFL, where programs are paying top dollar at certain positions and bargain rates for others all contingent on how much resources are on hand to spend.
How teams manage that — payroll of sorts — will be a primary favor in competitive balance once revenue sharing begins.
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“I think rewarding performance will be a part of this, whereas right now, it’s just a bunch of hypothetical,” Swinney said. “And again, there’s no rules. You can do whatever you want, and once the settlements are in place, I think you have to make internal decisions, both as an athletic department and as a football program. And then this changes from year to year, you know?
“So you know, some years you might have that fourth-year quarterback that you have a lot of money invested in, or you may have two senior tackles and a great wideout or a great corner, and then the next year, those guys move on. So, there’s some money freed up, so it might give you more flexibility within your cap in recruiting, because you do have to, you got to retain talent. You got to acquire talent.”
Infamous for being the nation’s only elite coach who rarely dips into the portal for talent, Swinney stressed his program’s “core values” to CBS Sports last month and said he’s always had a “very intentional” mindset when it comes to recruiting.
The Tigers signed three transfers in their 2025 class after taking two total — a pair of scholarship quarterbacks — over the previous three portal cycles.
Fellow two-time national champion Kirby Smart is another coach asking for portal reform, but his request is more rudimentary — decide on one transfer window. Currently, there’s a December timeline when the portal is open as teams prepare for bowl games and the College Football Playoff along with a 10-day window in April when spring practice concludes for most.
It has created a headache for coaches and resulted in a dip of televised, traditional spring games in 2025 in fear of teams offering dress rehearsals for other programs eyeing potential transfer targets.
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