Watching fans talk about recruiting is funny. Depending on how your team’s recruiting class turned out, the rankings are either proof positive your program is about to leap to a new level or completely rigged against your program. (Kind of like presidential polls…but I digress.)

Clemson is a perfect example of this phenomenon. In previous years, national rankings have looked favorably upon the staff’s efforts on the trail, leading many to put full faith and trust in selected outlets to accurately project the program’s future. This season, though, Dabo Swinney inked a small class. Terms like “average star rating” and “number of blue-chippers” became more accurate indicators of how Clemson performed overall, not those flawed rankings systems.

There are a hundred different ways to appraise a recruiting class. The quality-quantity discussion is as old as the hills. It will exist until the end of time. Clemson’s 2017 recruiting haul is thick on quality, but thin on quantity. The 14-person class ranks fourth in average recruiting score, according to the 247Sports Composite Rankings—the culmination of a four-year period of increasing talent accumulation on a per-player basis for Swinney’s program. That equation, though skewed heavily toward the quality side, still leads to a nationally significant class.

Look at the top of the rankings, though: The schools that set the pace don’t operate in a universe governed by an either-or proposition. Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia, and others all signed full classes largely comprised of top-notch recruits from all over the place. They don’t have to pick a lane. They can do it all.

While the Tigers are champions on the field, and they have made great strides in recruiting year after year, it still seems like an arduous climb to join those bluebloods at the top of the heap on National Signing Day. It’s fair to ask whether Clemson will ever be able to sign the top class in the country.

Lots of factors work against the Tigers in this regard. South Carolina is not a state brimming with top-flight talent, so Clemson has to go out of state to sign most of its elite prospects. Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State, Texas, and USC all hail from talent-rich states, making it easier to reap high-level harvests every year. Several top programs also operate in or around urban areas, making access to top recruits even easier—a luxury Clemson does not have.

Clemson University also isn’t quite as big as some other state schools vying for recruits. Its admissions standards have become stringent in recent years. While the administration’s goal is to increase overall enrollment over the next decade-plus, even a move toward 30,000 students would leave the Tigers significantly behind most other traditional powerhouses.

Obviously, the presence of Dabo Swinney and his staff of ace recruiters helps alleviate some of these disadvantages (and some others that are more minimally impactful). The new football operations complex, indoor facility, WestZone, and gameday environment all vault Clemson’s capabilities to a higher level. It’s not a stretch to say that the Tigers could conceivably make a persuasive pitch to any prospect in the country.

And yet, reaching the top spot still seems a pipe dream for one simple reason: Clemson just isn’t willing to do what it takes.

The programs perpetually at the top of the recruiting rankings have a little different philosophy. They sign full classes every single season. There are no 14-member classes at most of the schools mentioned because they simply find a way to make it work.

This means using more of a business model when handing out scholarships. One of my radio guests calls it a “meritocracy”, and there are benefits to doing it this way. There are no handouts. You get what you earn. There is a reward for beating the man in front of you. Performance matters, at least on the field. (There’s no need to share examples of off-field behavior that doesn’t seem to matter. You just thought of multiple examples on your own.)

Sure, there are plenty of things that happen to free up scholarships. Players want to play, so they transfer. Guys get homesick. Young people make bad choices. Guys graduate early and/or go pro, either to the NFL or to another career.

Those all happen at Clemson, but other programs go a step further. Scholarships—which are technically one-year agreements—are pulled from underachievers to make room for other players. One top program that lost the national championship to Clemson this season ran out of space and told a four-star defensive end ranked among the top ten in his position group in the country that he would have to grayshirt because there wasn’t enough room. The prospect accepted the offer, but it rubbed many observers the wrong way.

Swinney won’t do that in his program. Players aren’t collateral damage when coaches want to make the math work. Whereas other coaches run their programs strictly by business models, Swinney runs his like a college football team—at least as far as recruiting is concerned.

Recruiting coordinator Brandon Streeter discussed Clemson’s philosophy on smaller classes by addressing its ability to retain players year after year. In doing so, he took a tiny jab at some other programs that regularly engage in over-signing and have to make room for the potential talent on the way.

“There are schools out there that you see sign 25 every year, but you just do the math,” he said. “You know you only get 85 scholarships, so if guys are leaving your program all the time, then that allows you to bring in more guys with each and every class. So that’s what I would say. That’s my opinion.”

At Clemson, everything is about recruiting. In that statement, Streeter just told every mother of a high school junior that if a player comes to Clemson, there’s an extraordinarily good chance he finishes there. Even though some do leave for other opportunities, Swinney owns his recruiting misses, refusing to delete a player’s name from the roster just in case a new one is better.

There are certainly pros and cons to both philosophies. Both have resulted in national titles. Purists are more comfortable with Swinney’s way because it seems to them like one of the few bastions of amateurism left in an increasingly financially driven athletic realm careening quickly toward all-out professionalism.

Clemson has shown it won’t cook the books to sign a top class, so it probably won’t ever be at the top of the rankings in the current landscape. It doesn’t seem like the coaches care, though, because they know a comforting fact about their method.

It works.

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