In July 2021, in a hotel conference room in Uptown Charlotte, a day before ACC football media days, the conference’s head coaches gathered to hear a presentation.
Then-Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick, assigned to explain the new expanded College Football Playoff to the group, stood in front of them. For more than an hour, Swarbrick described the 12-team format, which will make its inaugural start this weekend.
When he finished his presentation, Swarbrick looked around the room and saw disturbing expressions.
They hated him.
The majority among the haters? Clemson coach Dabo Swinney.
“At one point I had to tell them, ‘Look, guys, I’m just relaying the information to you,’” Swarbrick recalls.
More than three years later, days before the first round of the postseason begins, Swinney and his Tigers, precisely, are the beneficiaries of the expanded format that he so roundly criticized. Clemson, seeded 12th in the 12-team field, won the ACC championship game to secure the fifth and final automatic qualifying spot designated for the conference champions.
And yet, Swinney has no regrets. 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 style is that I thought college football was unique. And now it’s like everything else. It’s like the professionals.”
You’re right, of course.
Even the most strident supporters of an expanded postseason acknowledge that the new postseason brings college football one step closer to emulating its big brother. It represents one of many such movements in the The industry’s well-documented march toward professionalism..
In July, for example, schools can pay players directly. They will be signed contracts, some even with acquisitions, and many of them will negotiate through agents. Schools are hiring NFL coaches and executives to operate in this new professional world.
Heck, college football is even adopting playing rules from its professional counterpart. This year, the sport added a two-minute warning.
“It seems like college football is more like pro football right now,” new North Carolina coach Bill Belichick acknowledged in an interview last week with Pat McAfee.
Pro-like changes are having significant impacts on the industry. Whether they are positive or negative is up for debate. But one thing is becoming clear: There is parity in the game for the first time in years, if not ever, another staple of the NFL.
That parity? Coaches and administrators believe it is a result of players having freedom of movement.
Even Swinney thinks that’s true.
“What is the most important position in football? Attack player. Everybody has the ability to look for a quarterback,” Swinney said. “These kids don’t sit down. Or the kids played really well and they have the opportunity to move somewhere else and financially it’s a no-brainer for them. You can go from an inexperienced quarterback to a great one in the blink of an eye. That is a turning point for many programs.”
Five of the 12 playoff teams have a first-year starting quarterback. Dillon Gabriel, at his third school, leads top-seeded Oregon to the playoffs after playing at Oklahoma last year. Arizona State quarterback Sam Leavitt began his career at Michigan State.
Eighth-seeded Ohio State starts Will Howard a year after he threw 24 touchdowns for Kansas State, and Indiana quarterback Kurtis Rourke played in the Mid-American Conference last season. Finally, there’s Notre Dame, which plucked Riley Leonard from Duke during the offseason.
That ignores perhaps the most important beneficiary of any playoff team’s portal: SMU.
Mustangs are a shining example of this new-age model. They attracted substitutes 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 prospect who played receiver in Miami behind Hurricanes star Xavier Restrepo. Starting tight end Matthew Hibner played at Michigan as a reserve last year.
Major college transfers make up the entirety of SMU’s defensive front, one that Swinney describes as “the biggest D-line we’ve played this year.” Two are from Miami, one from Arkansas and one from Georgia.
“They were not he guys at their last 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 maintains that college football’s blue bloods can no longer “load up, create a monopoly and dominate over and over again,” he says. Players, who were previously restricted to one school and penalized for transferring, are now free to move. They are leaving school to start working and, in some cases, receive larger salaries.
“They transfer so they can play and that distributes the talent more,” Lashlee said.
Kind of like free agency in…the NFL, right?
Except, of course, at the university there is no employment or collective bargaining and, at least at this time, no binding, enforceable contracts. Perhaps those are the main differences that still exist between the two.
“When (Lashlee) got there, they didn’t have staff like they have now,” Swinney said. “He won’t have time to develop it through high school recruiting. Now you have the ability to look for types.”
SMU is not alone in how it has built its roster to find the promised land of the playoffs. At Indiana, first-year coach Curt Cignetti largely built a team of Group of Five-level transfers, many of them from his old school, James Madison.
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IU’s top four tacklers are freshman transfers. So are the four best running backs and the four best receivers. Their sack leader is a transfer, Mikail Kamara, and their long snapper is also a transfer.
IU transfers (22 total) call themselves the “Five Star Group.” They will meet Notre Dame on 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,” IU star linebacker Aiden Fisher said earlier this season.
The number one team in the country also has portal kids, many of them from the SEC. Two of Oregon’s top three receivers are from Texas A&M and Alabama, the second-leading tackler is from Ole Miss and Jordan Burch, second in sacks, played at South Carolina.
Ohio State’s portal haul was one of the most prized in the country, many from the SEC as well, including safety Caleb Downs and running back Quinshon Judkins.
A playoff team with almost no transfers? Clemson, which was 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 world, even that is changing.
Clemson on Monday signed its first non-quarterback transfer in six years in Southeast Missouri State receiver Tristan Smith. The measure caused shock in the world of college football. For years, Swinney has opposed accepting transfers, pointing to the fact that his program doesn’t have many “holes” to fill.
Clemson doesn’t have many transfer players and Swinney has often said he is against sending them away.
Unfortunately, he finally found a spot for an FCS wide receiver. Will it open the floodgates? Unlikely.
“We’re not in the market for a lot of these guys, but if you have a hole, I don’t care who you are, you can fill it,” he said. “That’s a tie.”
College football’s new NFL-like parity will be on display this weekend. What will unfold over the next month is very much a professional tiebreaker, as Swinney maintains. There are first-round byes, home games and winter weather.
But it’s not all bad, he finally admits.
“It’s created more opportunities and will continue to (expand), but it just changed the focus toward the playoffs. It’s about the playoffs. “That’s probably not a bad thing,” he said.
But, like the NFL, fans should prepare for more losses given the nature of parity. Everyone needs to be more patient than ever, Swinney says.
“There won’t be many undefeated teams,” he said. “Just a few years ago, the Chiefs got the wild card and made it to the Super Bowl. When they stood up and raised the trophy, they didn’t say, ‘But you guys had a really bad regular season!’ That’s where we headed. It’s just going to be more like the NFL as far as mentality and psyche.”
Could Clemson be college football’s version of the wild-card Chiefs? They were the last team in the field and have three losses this season, two of them by blowout. Can they defeat the Longhorns and then beat the Sun Devils in the Peach Bowl quarterfinals? How would they fare in a semifinal game against Oregon, Ohio State or Tennessee?
Buckle up, says Swinney: The changes in the playoffs are not over and the Super League is also just around the corner. “It will grow to 14 or 16 teams and everything will be restructured.”