CLEMSON, S.C. — With the transfer portal and drama surrounding it spinning out of control in recent weeks in college football, Clemson coach Dabo Swinney offered a wry smile Wednesday.

“We’re just sitting back and watching, watching it all around us,” Swinney told ESPN. “It’s a crazy time, although I’m not sure a lot of people in our sport should be surprised. I’m just glad we’re not a part of it.”

Swinney, entering his 17th full season at Clemson, has been outspoken about the transfer portal and his reluctance to use it except as a means for filling gaps on his roster and not “trying to outbid people” for high school players and paying them large sums of money before they prove themselves in college.

“It’s not just these last few weeks, but the last few years, and there certainly has been no rules, and whatever rules there were — if you tried to enforce them — then they would get changed, and you’d wait six months, and they would change again,” Swinney said. “So, yeah, there has been a ton of chaos, and it’s like I told our staff. We’re entering a really chaotic time.

“But the more chaos out there, the better it is for us because we’re built for it.”

Just in the past two weeks, quarterbacks Nico Iamaleava and Joey Aguilar swapped places — Iamaleava to UCLA and Aguilar to Tennessee — after Iamaleava skipped practice before the Vols’ spring game and then entered the portal after wanting his NIL deal increased. Aguilar was with UCLA all spring but left after Iamaleava joined the Bruins. Aguilar had just transferred to UCLA from Appalachian State a few months earlier.

In addition, Iamaleava’s younger brother, Madden, left Arkansas last week and plans to transfer to UCLA, leading Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek to make a statement that he would support the Hogs’ collective in recouping NIL money from any athlete violating an agreement moving forward.

“It’s unfortunate that we couldn’t make things simpler in college football and that we have to go through times like this,” Swinney said. “That’s one of the ironies of life, that you have to go through a lot of bad before eventually people say, ‘You know what? We probably shouldn’t do that.'”

The Tigers did bring in three transfers this year during the winter portal, but only two other scholarship players since the advent of the portal in 2018. Swinney said the Tigers have lost only two players to the portal whom he genuinely wanted to keep: safety Andrew Mukuba to Texas and defensive end A.J. Hoffler to Georgia Tech.

Cade Klubnik, entering his third season as the Tigers’ starting quarterback, said the lack of a revolving door among players has made for a stronger locker room and set the tone for what should be Clemson’s deepest and most talented team since the 2015-19 stretch when the Tigers either won the national championship or played in the national championship game all but one season.

“We’re going to have 99.8 percent of our team from January ’till next January. We’re not losing a bunch of guys. We’re not getting a bunch of guys,” said Klubnik, who passed for 3,639 yards and accounted for 43 touchdowns last season. “You see these teams out there that are losing 10 or 15 guys after spring and then bringing in 20 guys. We had player-led meetings today, and it was the same guys in the room as last January. It’s not like you’re trying to get to know a lot of strangers.”

Swinney’s comments in 2014 about not paying players outright went viral. He remains adamantly opposed to professionalizing the sport and taking the scholastic component out of the equation. He said he does believe the House settlement revenue sharing model will help bring some stability in how to best compensate players and create some uniformity.

“I’m not going to pay a high school kid who’s never played a down of college football a million dollars. Not going to do it,” Swinney said. “Let them get here, perform and earn it. There’s a big difference.”

Clemson was ranked No. 7 in ESPN’s Way-Too-Early Top 25 in January and returns most of the key pieces from its ACC championship team a year ago. The Tigers lost 38-24 to Texas in the first round of the College Football Playoff.

When Clemson dipped to 9-4 in 2023, the only time in the past 14 years the Tigers haven’t won at least 10 games, Swinney heard the narrative that the rest of college football was passing the Tigers by because of his refusal to change with the times in the NIL/transfer portal world.

“We’ve been to the playoff seven of the last 10 years and won eight of the last 10 ACC championships,” Swinney said. “That’s the narrative. I don’t care about other people’s narratives. The only narrative I care about is what happens on the field and staying with our purpose of graduating players and winning games, and that’s not going to change regardless of what happens around us.”

Of the 395 seniors who finished their career at Clemson under Swinney, 389 earned their degrees.

“And we’re still working on those other six,” he said.

Klubnik said there’s no talk in Clemson’s locker room of who’s making what kind of money or anything NIL-related.

“If there is, the leaders on this team shut it down real fast,” he said.

Over and above the returning experience and talent on Clemson’s team, Klubnik said what he’s most excited about is how “hungry” the Tigers are after losing to rival South Carolina in the regular-season finale a year ago and then ending their season in the first round of the playoff.

“Most of us are veterans that went through that 2023 season, and we’ve kind of been through the fire together, kind of hit rock-bottom and just continued to climb,” Klubnik said. “We’ve got to go do it. I don’t really care about the preseason rankings and all that. None of it matters. We haven’t done anything yet. We’ve got to put our head down and go to work every day. That’s really what we’re chasing.”

Swinney isn’t into comparisons and how this team might stack to some of his others entering the 2025 season, but what stands out to him is how strong Clemson is up the middle on defense. He said the depth on the offensive line has “never been better” and that having Klubnik and all his top receivers back should make the Tigers even more explosive than a year ago.

Clemson fans are eager to see five-star freshman running back Gideon Davidson, whom Swinney called “as talented a back as we’ve brought in here,” but added there was plenty of competition. Swinney pointed to Adam Randall, whose transition from receiver to running back should pay big dividends.

“This team has a chance, and they’ve responded,” Swinney said. “It’s a good group, a group that likes to work. Now, let’s take it to the field.”