Clemson Tigers College Football Pregame Quote, 12/26/2019

SCOTT LEIGHTMAN: Coach, give us an update on how the week has been going since we last saw you on Sunday?

COACH SWINNEY: Well, it is a great day to be alive, right on cue, with Travis Tritt right there, great intro. It’s been great. It’s been an awesome week. I appreciate all of the help of everyone that worked so hard to make it a great week. We just kind of show up, and things are ready and we go to practice and all that stuff. But I know there’s a lot of volunteers that really make it a seamless week for us. And then we had some weather, so we had to go over and practice at Arizona State one day. That worked out perfect.

So it’s been a good week. The guys are excited. We got a chance to spend a little time last night with the Ohio State staff and Coach Day and really enjoyed that, had a lot of opportunity to be around Coach Day, and just a genuine guy. Enjoyed dinner last night. So it’s been good. We’re healthy. Everybody’s excited about playing and looking forward to a great night Saturday night. It’s going to be a heck of a ball game, two great teams that I think really are kind of mirror images of each other in a lot of ways, and probably come down to a few plays.

I wonder if you have someone who just tracks roster management now with guys beingable to leave after four games and retaining their eligibility. Has that changed on your staff? Can you have one person track that?

COACH SWINNEY: Roster management guy, pretty much starts and ends with me. That’s it.

How hard is that now that guys can retain a year after playing four games and leave after three?

COACH SWINNEY: It really hasn’t been that much of a challenge for us at this point. I’m sure maybe if I was somewhere else or in a different stage in our journey at Clemson, maybe it would be more challenging, but it really hasn’t been that big a deal for us at this point. We don’t sign grad transfers, so I don’t recruit the portal yet. There may come a day. I reserve the right to change my mind. I have no idea. I may have 20 guys pack up and leave one day, but have not recruited the portal.

The guys that we have had transfer, the great majority of them are graduates. I think, again, when you graduate, it just creates more options for you. If that’s something that they want to do, I’ve always supported that. I don’t always agree with it, but I always support that and wish them well. And then we’ve only had the one issue with [Xavier] Kelly on the four-game thing. So I really just haven’t had much experience with it, and it really has not been a distraction for us.

Lot of folks talk about the skill positions in this game, but the big – we look at the offensive line, defensive line matchup here, especially the matchup between Jackson Carman andChase Young. What can you say to Jackson when you talk to him about that matchup?

COACH SWINNEY: Must-see TV! Their DL is special. They look like our guys last year, and not just that they have some superstar-type guys, but they have depth. They’ve got a lot of guys. Listen, they take that number 2 out, 11 comes in, he’s pretty good. There’s not a lot of drop-off. That guy is really good, twitchy. And same thing in their deep tackle when they bring 67 in there.

They’re just deep and they’re experienced. They can get pressure on the quarterback. They have been able to get pressure on the quarterback without having to bring pressure. They don’t blitz very much. They probably are the least blitz team we’ve seen all year, but they haven’t had to because of their skill and talent up front.

So it’s must-see TV because we’re pretty good in the offensive line. They get a lot of sacks; we don’t give up many. They get a lot of tackles for loss; we don’t give up many. So it’s a great matchup. It’s the way a game like this should be.

Our strength is our offensive line; their strength is their defensive line. And everybody gets kind of enamored with the quarterbacks and the wide outs and those DBs and all that stuff and these great backs, but that will be quite a battle right there to watch all night long. Hopefully, we can ‚Äì we’re going to lose some of them, but hopefully we can win a lot more than we lose throughout the night, but it’s going to be a huge challenge.

But our guys are excited. You want to play the best. Jackson [Carman] and Tremayne [Anchrum] are excited about the challenge.

Obviously, this is not your first time here. It’s not your first time playing this type ofprogram. I’m curious how much of the landscape is factored into your plan, how much hasbeen discussed and how much the players are aware of.

COACH SWINNEY: It has zero to do. College rosters turn over pretty quick. Three years is a lifetime in college football. So nobody’s been here, with the exception of our fourth-year juniors. Like Isaiah Simmons would be a fourth-year junior, and then our true seniors. So that’s the only ‚Äì the rest of the roster has not been here. They have no experience playing Ohio State.

So they weren’t a part of that. They were all in high school and not a part of our program. So it has not been a factor at all. This is totally different teams and dynamics and those type of things. Certainly, as a program, you draw from your experience and your history just from a program standpoint. But from this roster, there’s just not a lot of carryover from that game.

You guys are in a period of unprecedented success with your program. What can you sayto all of the fans that, no matter where you go in the country, will travel with you and will cometo see you guys play?

COACH SWINNEY: Well, just how much we appreciate our fan base. It’s one of the things that makes Clemson special and unique is we have an unbelievably passionate fan base that show up. You come to any home game, people sometimes will say, “Hey, Coach, I want to catch a game and what’s a good one?” And I’m always like, “Just pick one. They’re all good.”

Our fans show up. It doesn’t matter who we play. It’s awesome, whether we’re playing UNC Charlotte or Florida State or whoever. It’s always a great crowd. And then when we go on the road, same thing, tremendous support. I know we’ll have a good crowd out here. I know it’s a long way, but they’ll show up and make their presence known, leave some $2 bills all over Arizona, I’m sure.

Sometimes when you’re describing the way people around the country view your program, you use the phrase “Little ole Clemson.” I’m wondering what are the origins of it? What exactly does it mean when you describe your program that way?

COACH SWINNEY: I’ve been saying that for a long time because we are little ole Clemson. If you’ve been to Clemson, we’ve only got about 14,000 people in our population there, and ‚Äì I don’t know ‚Äì about 20,000 students maybe.

So it’s probably the biggest stadium per capita in the country for the city that it’s in. It’s just little ole Clemson. It’s just a small town, a small college atmosphere but yet you’ve got this 80-plus-thousand seat stadium and 150,000 people roll into the town on the weekends. It’s incredible.

But then they all leave. Monday through Friday, we kind of have our own world. It’s just a small ‚Äì we have one of everything, two of a few things. We’ve got a Starbucks. You know? We’ve got a Walmart, a Publix. We have about one of everything.

So there’s just a simplicity there that’s unique. I think there’s a quality of life in Clemson that’s really special. So we’re just little ole Clemson. We’ve been that way for a long time. But it’s something I used to talk to the team about all the time 11 years ago when I got the job. I’d say we’re little ole Clemson, but we’ve got everything we need to compete at the highest level. We’re going to build a big program, and we’ve been able to do that.

Another question about Jackson Carman. Ohio State doesn’t use a lot of Ohio kids, I thinkmaybe one. How did you pull that off and how well has he played?

COACH SWINNEY: We got two. Matt Bockhorst is already a great player, but, man, when John Simpson gets out of here, he’s going to step in and fill that void pretty quickly. That’s a strong comment because John Simpson is an all-American player, but Bock is a great player in his own right.

So Robbie [Caldwell] did a great job, first of all. We try to reach out to the top guys in the country. And as our brand has grown, we get a lot of reciprocation these days. And a lot of times, early on, you reach out to guys and they’ll be like, “Clemson? Where’s that?” or “No, I’m not interested,” or whatever. And you just move on.

But now our footprint has and our brand has allowed us to get a lot of reciprocation from a lot of these players. Jackson [Carman] was a guy early on that was like, “Yeah, I’m interested in Clemson. I’d like to go see it.” So his coach brought him down, Coach Krause brought him down. It was a great visit, just a first visit, meeting. So he was just always interested and we were just always in his schools. If I remember correctly, I think it was us and maybe Ohio State and Southern Cal were his three schools.

So I didn’t know he was coming until signing day, the morning of signing day. He called and said, “Hey, I’m coming to Clemson.” So he’s a very unique kid if you get to know him, very dynamic person. He’s unbelievably talented. He has lots of interests. He’s this massive man, but he can sing, he can play the guitar, he can surf. It’s unbelievable what he can do.

I just think he was attracted, but also his dad had lived in South Carolina at a stage. So there were some ties there. In the end, I think he just felt comfortable with our program. He’s a great player. He’s a first-year starter. Played a lot last year backing up Mitch Hyatt, but a first-year starter, and I think as good as we’ve ever had and has the potential to be really, really special. Got his hands full Saturday, though.

I know you guys don’t have anybody on the roster currently from Arizona, but you’ve been recruiting west coast pretty hard the last couple of years. How do games like this and 2016kind of refocus your recruiting efforts and whether or not you’re going to invest a lot ofresources into the state of Arizona in the future.

COACH SWINNEY: We don’t invest a lot of resources, so to speak, just, like, coming to Arizona. We just go wherever. There’s no real set place. We talk about building the inside out. And we’re going to recruit Georgia and North Carolina and South Carolina and Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, Florida, Alabama. That’s kind of our area, if you will.

But what has happened is, like, we just signed a pretty good quarterback out of California. And we weren’t recruiting him. His coach tells the story, I think he had a million offers as a sophomore or something like that, but the coach was talking to him about is there a school out there that you like? And he was like, “Yeah, Clemson.”

You think about it. He’s 16 at that point. The last nine years, he’s grown up watching little ole Clemson. So we get a lot of that, where these kids have grown up watching us and they’re interested. So his coach actually reached out to us. And Coach Streeter looks at it, and goes, “Wow. Yeah, he’s pretty good.”

So we don’t really just, like, go say let’s go recruit all of California or Arizona or whatever, but we do track who we think are the best players and reach out. But what has happened is a lot of these kids have reciprocated.

So we signed Joseph Ngata out of the Sacramento area last year. So back-to-back years, we’ve signed a kid from California for the first time in the history of our school. And so it’s not about just going and getting guys; it’s still, for us, about the right fit, just fitting our program, the core values of our program, the expectations and value of education, those types of things.

And it’s been pretty cool to be able to see our reach grow. So, yeah, we’ll come to Arizona. We’ll go to Alaska. We’ve got a young man coming from Canada this year. So I’m super excited about that.