In July of 2021, within a hotel conference room in Uptown Charlotte, one day before ACC football media days, the head coaches of the conference gathered to hear a presentation.
Then-Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick, assigned to explain to the group the new expanded College Football Playoff, stood before them. For more than an hour, Swarbrick described the 12-team format, the very same one having its inaugural kickoff this weekend.
As his presentation ended, Swarbrick glanced around the room at troubling expressions.
They hated it.
Most among the haters? Clemson coach Dabo Swinney.
“At one point, I had to tell them, ‘Look, guys, I am just relaying you the information,’” Swarbrick recalls.
More than three years later, days before the first round of the postseason begins, Swinney and his Tigers, of all people, are beneficiaries of the expanded format that he so roundly criticized. The 12th seed of the 12-team field, Clemson won the ACC championship game to secure the fifth and final automatic qualifier 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 is what I thought it would be,” he told Yahoo Sports in an interview earlier this month. “What I liked about the old way is that I thought college football was unique. And now it’s just like everything else. It’s just like the pros.”
He’s got a point, of course.
Even the most strident supporters of an expanded playoff acknowledge that the new postseason moves college football another step closer to emulating its big brother. It represents one of many such moves on the industry’s well-documented march toward professionalism.
In July, for instance, schools are permitted to directly pay players. They’ll sign them to contracts, some even with buyouts, and many of them negotiated through agents. Schools are hiring coaches and front office executives from the NFL to operate in this new pro-like world.
Heck, college football is even adopting playing rules from its pro 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.
The 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? It is a result, coaches and administrators believe, in players having the freedom of movement.
Even Swinney believes that to be true.
“What’s the most important position in football? Quarterback. Everybody has the ability to go get a quarterback,” Swinney said. “These kids don’t sit. Or the kids played really well and they’ve got an 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 a heartbeat. That’s a game-changer for a lot of programs.”
Five of the 12 playoff teams have a first-year starting quarterback. Dillon Gabriel, on his third school, leads top-seeded Oregon into the playoffs 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, which plucked Riley Leonard from Duke over the offseason.
That ignores, perhaps, the most significant beneficiary of the portal of any playoff team: SMU.
The Mustangs are a shining example of this new age model. They lured away backups and role players from more historical 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 at Miami behind Hurricanes star Xavier Restrepo. Starting tight end Matthew Hibner played at Michigan in a reserve role 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 another from Georgia.
“They weren’t the guys at their last school,” SMU coach Rhett Lashlee said. “Those schools didn’t want them to leave, but they had the chance to make an impact.”
With the new transfer rules, Lashlee contends that the blue bloods of college football can no longer “load up, create a monopoly and dominate over and over again,” he says. Players, previously restricted to one school and penalized for transferring, are now free to move. They are leaving schools for starting jobs and, in some cases, bigger paychecks.
“They transfer so they can play and it spreads the talent out more,” Lashlee said.
Kind of like free agency in … the NFL, no?
Except, of course, in college there is no employment or collective bargaining and, at least right now, no enforceable, binding contracts. Perhaps those are the main dissimilarities that still exist between the two.
“When (Lashlee) got there, they didn’t have personnel like they have now,” Swinney said. “He’s not going to have time to build it through high school recruiting. You’ve got the ability now to go get dudes.”
SMU isn’t alone in how it has constructed its roster to find the playoff promised land. At Indiana, first-year coach Curt Cignetti largely built a team of transfers from the Group of Five level, many from his former school, James Madison.
IU’s top four tacklers are first-year transfers. So are the top four rushers and the top four receivers. Its leader in sacks is a transfer, Mikail Kamara, and its long snapper is a transfer too.
IU’s transfers — 22 in all — call themselves the “Group of Five All-Stars.” They meet Notre Dame on Friday night in South Bend with reminders of the preseason Big Ten projections. The Hoosiers were picked 17th out of 18 teams.
“They said we had too many Group of Five players,” said Aiden Fisher, IU’s star linebacker, earlier this season.
The No. 1 team in the country is stocked with portal guys too, many of them from the SEC. Two of Oregon’s top three receivers are from Texas A&M and Alabama, the second-best 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 also from the SEC, including safety Caleb Downs and running back Quinshon Judkins.
One playoff team almost completely devoid of transfers? Clemson, which was the only non-military academy not to accept a transfer last cycle — a long-tenured staple of the program under Swinney.
But, in this pro-like world, even that is changing.
Clemson signed its first non-quarterback transfer in six years Monday with Southeast Missouri State receiver Tristan Smith. The move sent shockwaves through the college football world. Swinney has for years pushed back against accepting transfers, pointing to the fact that his program doesn’t have many “gaps” to fill.
Clemson doesn’t have many players transfer out and Swinney has often said he’s against pushing them out.
Alas, he finally found a spot for an FCS wideout. Will it open the floodgates? Unlikely.
“We’re not in the market for a lot of these guys, but if you have a gap, I don’t care who you are, you can go 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-like playoff, as Swinney contends. There are first-round byes, home games and wintry weather.
But it’s not all bad, he finally admits.
“It has created more opportunity and it’s going to keep (expanding), but it’s just changed the focus to the playoff. It’s all about the playoff. That’s probably not a bad thing,” he said.
But, like the NFL, fans should prepare for more losses given the nature of the parity. Everyone needs to have more patience than ever before, Swinney says.
“There’s not going to be very many undefeated teams,” he said. “Just a few years ago, the Chiefs made the wild card and made the Super Bowl. When they stood up and held the trophy up, they didn’t go, ‘But y’all had a really bad regular season!’ That’s where we are headed. It’s just going to be more like the NFL when it comes to the 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 in blowout fashion. Can they knock off the Longhorns and then beat the Sun Devils in the Peach Bowl quarterfinal? How would they fare in a semifinal game against Oregon, Ohio State or Tennessee?
Buckle up, says Swinney: The playoff changes aren’t over and the super league is around the corner too. “It will grow to 14 or 16 teams and the whole thing will be restructured.”
