Dabo Swinney and the Clemson football program, on paper, brought in one of their weakest recruiting classes in years, but it’s quality over quantity for the Tigers with this 2025 class.
The 2025 cycle is behind us, with ESPN recently releasing their 2025 Top 75 college football rankings ($$$). It was an uncharacteristically low ranking for the Tigers, who landed with the No. 37 class in the country. While the Tigers are used to being one of the top recruiters in the country, they landed at No. 6 in the ACC, behind programs such as Duke and Syracuse. These are simply things you do not expect from a Dabo Swinney-led team.
Even so, ESPN analyst Craig Haubert believes that this Clemson 2025 class has a lot of quality. On the ESPN CollegeFootballLive: SigningDaySpecial ($$$) show, Haubert told Clemson fans not to worry about the ranking they see with this most recent class.
If you’re Clemson fans, don’t freak out. You’re just lower [in the rankings] because you don’t have a lot of numbers in that class, but there’s quality there. There’s so many ways to kind of look at these things and read them. But with the new (NCAA 105-player roster cap) and transfers, there’s some classes, if you go through ESPN.com, that have 50 players in it. Clemson’s around 18. You know what that speaks to — that speaks to retention. And this class actually has a few transfers in it. We should have a ‘breaking news’ banner. There’s a few transfers in it. There’s three.
Clemson has some top-tier talent in this class, headlined by defensive tackle Amare Adams. While he’s ranked lower by ESPN at No. 56, he ranks as 247Sports No. 7 overall player in the class. Adams, along with running backs Gideon Davidson and Marquise Henderson who, could have an immediate impact. When you take into account Purdue transfer Will Heldt and the massive addition he is, things don’t look too bad for Clemson.
This article originally appeared on Clemson Wire: ESPN analyst believes Clemson’s recruiting class has a lot of quality
