I don’t follow college football and recruiting enough to have understood how it happened, and maybe to a degree we will never know precisely how it happened, but that could be why I find Clemson’s dominance since 2015 to be so intriguing. Rarely thinking of college football at all unless it’s for the draft, I’ll randomly catch myself researching the history of Dabo Swinney and his incredible accomplishments as a first-time head coach at Clemson.
When the Tigers were recruiting their 2016 freshman class, Swinney had just led them to their first number one ranking since 1981 (and prior to that they had never been number one) and a loss to Alabama in the national championship.