Clemson Recruiting: State of the Roster

Football season is great, but we can never forget about recruiting. While Clemson’s season hasn’t started, the Class of 2025 is already close to being complete. But even with a current class of 15 commits, there is still some room for additional talent, especially with Dabo’s desire to eschew the Portal in favor of recruits.

As has become tradition, we’re going to take a look at Clemson’s current roster and what it means for the class of 2025 to highlight where we think Clemson will try to round out the class.

Below is a breakdown of Clemson’s current roster by position and class year. For simplicity, redshirt players are listed with non redshirt players of the given year.

Before we look at transfers, this table gives us a look at just how young quite a few spots are. WR, CB, and DE in particular all have 0 seniors. Which is pretty incredible when you think of it. In terms of recruiting though, these areas are all potential transfer spots. With a large number of underclassmen, players who don’t see enough playing time may pull the plug on their Clemson career quickly. One last thing to note, right now Clemson only has 84 players on scholarship, we expect Dabo to award someone with a 1 year scholarship and so for all of these tables just add 1 to the seniors column.

But we’re here to look at future roster needs. And to do that we care about who may be leaving, the current class of 2025, and what the fall may bring. Below is a breakdown by position of the current seniors on the team, the current class of 2025 commits, and potential spots for transfers. As we’ve noted in the past, potential transfers are a bit of a crapshoot, but I’ve attempted to project at positions where there is a backlog of young players. It seems likely we’d see at least 1 or 2 players leave when more than half the payers at the position are freshman or sophomores.

So let’s start with the current seniors. As of right now 13 players are in their final year at Clemson. There are potential exceptions in RJ Mickens, Demonte Capehart, Walker Parks, Tyler Venables (yes, I am not joking), and Tre Williams. All are members of the class of 2020 and may be eligible for an additional year due to COVID rules. But if anyone is staying that is likely a happy accident and will be balanced by additional transfers.

Moving from seniors to potential departures, this is where we just start throwing darts at the wall. The past few years with the transfer portal indicate we should see around 10 players transferring, with a consistent 3-4 players heading to the NFL. However that has also coincided with fewer seniors graduating, in part due to COVID. Based on that I’ve got 12 players departing, with the positions broken out above. In particular the positions I earmarked for transfers are those with an inordinate number of underclassmen already on the team. Those are spots where players are more likely to leave if they don’t break the two deep early.

Now based on all of this, we are looking at a potential class of 26 commits, remember we only have 84 players currently on scholarship. Right now the class of 2025 has 15 commits. That gives the staff room for 11 more commits. Or for those of you who are all in on the Portal, maybe 8 or so commits with room for 3 or so transfers, and we can finally say Dabo is using the portal.

All of this shows that despite the strong start, Clemson still has plenty of work to do in the class of 2025. Even if Dabo goes all in on the portal there is plenty of room for additional commits, otherwise the Tigers may be forced to scramble in December to get to 85 scholarship players.