TIGERS RECRUITING CLASS: IT'S ALL IN THE NUMBERS

Head football coach Dabo Swinney referred to the 2009 recruiting class, consisting of twelve signed players, as the "Dandy Dozen" yesterday. There certainly has been a lot of talk about how small the class is in terms of the number of players and indeed it is an unusually low number. Of all the recruiting classes listed in ESPN's Top 25, on which Clemson's is ranked 19th, it is by far the smallest. In fact, defending national champion Florida had the next smallest class with 16. Ole Miss signed the largest class with 38 and the average class size of the Top 25 was 22.6.

The NCAA allows D-1 football programs to sign up to 25 scholarship athletes during a particular season. However, programs "oversign" (more than 25) on signing day usually for two reasons: One, they suspect some players will not qualify academically and therefore never enroll. Two, they didn't sign 25 the previous year and are trying to make up for it during the current year. If the allotment of 25 is not used in a given year, additional signees can be included the following year provided they enroll in December and are on campus for the spring semester. The number allowed still cannot exceed the max. 25 for that previous year's class. Any additional players that exceed the 25 limit from the year before count against the current class.

In Clemson's case, not only did we not oversign, we didn't sign the 25 allowed by the rules. Therefore, some speculated the low number was due to recruits de-committing after Bowden's departure. This is only partially true. Coach Swinney mentioned yesterday that two other numbers played into things: 85 and 15. The NCAA rules allow Div. 1 programs to have no more than 85 players on scholarship in total at any given time, so the 85 rule trumps the 25 rule. In essence, we only had 15 scholarships to offer and still fit under the 85 total, regardless of the 25 allowable.

One other thing that played into the 15 we had to offer is what Coach Swinney referred to yesterday as "grey shirts" Spencer Benton (PK) and Terrence Ashe (WR) being promised scholarships this year. Grey shirt players commit to a team that is over-signed and then either doesn't go to school in the fall or enrolls part-time and pays their own way. They are not officially on the team. In January of the following year, the player enrolls full-time and officially joins the team. They are technically part of the recruiting class for the current year, not the year they committed. Once they join the team, they still have the full five year window to play four years and the ability to red-shirt if they so choose.

In conclusion, we really had 17 scholarships to offer but 2 were reserved for Benton and Ashe, leaving only 15 for the new recruits. We only signed 12, so we will carry those three over to next year. Over-signing in past years "caught up to us", if you will, this year. If things had unfolded differently where 3 of the players we offered had signed with us as opposed to signing with other programs, then we would have used all our scholarships and still had the smallest number of signees of the top 25 recruiting classes. We just didn't have a huge number of outgoing seniors/graduate students and thankfully the Tigers don't have a lot of attrition due to transfers, academic casualties and players getting in trouble.

More recruiting class news and discussion of comments made by Coach Swinney regarding the future of the program coming up shortly.