As more and more schools elect to cancel their spring games over tampering concerns and other worries, Clemson’s Dabo Swinney is deciding to do things his own way.
Dabo’s Tigers will reportedly move forward with their annual spring exhibition and he believes the reasoning for other programs’ cancelations is mostly nonsense — taking a bit of a dig at Nebraska’s Matt Rhule in the process.
“We’re going to have a spring game and I hope we can have some type of fan day with it as well,” Swinney said. “I don’t know, we’ll see. Listen, whether you have a spring game or not it’s going to be tampering.”
“Ain’t nobody going to go look at the spring game, go, ‘Oh yeah, boy,'” the coach argued. “They got PFF. That’s called PFF, they’ve got everything on everybody already. Canceling the spring game ain’t going to stop tampering. We’re going to need a lot more help than that to stop tampering. And hopefully at some point that’ll happen.”
Dabo went on to say that even though Clemson will have its spring game, it doesn’t mean that he and his staff won’t take necessary precautions where they see fit.
“I just think, again, when you look at, when you evaluate things, I mean for us for example, you look at your career snaps, your career offensive, defensive snaps and [veteran O-lineman] Blake Miller’s probably top of that list for us,” Swinney said.
“You look at those guys that have played a ton of snaps. Do I really need to see Blake play live this spring? No. He needs to get some work, and he’ll get a lot of work, but you’ll limit his live work. He doesn’t need a lot of live work. But you know who does? All those other dudes.”
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Clemson’s Orange vs. White Game will take place on April 5 at 1 PM ET. They open the season with a home game vs. LSU at Memorial Stadium on Aug. 30.
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