FOX Sports’ lead college football analyst, Joel Klatt, showed some love to Clemson this week.
Klatt joined Colin Cowherd on The Herd and had praise for Dabo Swinney and his program when talking with Cowherd about the transfer portal.
Of course, Swinney has taken plenty of heat for his transfer portal approach and use of the portal, or lack thereof. But Klatt was complimentary of the Tigers when comparing them to a team such as Florida State, which relies very heavily on the portal.
Here’s the dialogue between Klatt and Cowherd during their transfer portal discussion:
“The transfer portal is forcing teams to have to constantly rebuild cohesion and chemistry,” Cowherd said. “So if you get a junior, senior team with a lot of like Texas O-linemen that have been together for three years, you not only have the talent advantage, you have the chemistry, cohesion, team advantage.”
“There is no question. … It’s true,” Klatt responded. “As other teams lose that cohesiveness and chemistry, the margin between the teams that are rebuilding every single year out of the portal – like a Florida State – and the teams that can stick together – like, look at Clemson as a great example of this.”
“We bang on Dabo all the time,” Klatt added.
“They’ve righted the ship a little bit,” Cowherd responded.
“You betcha they have,” Klatt said.
Klatt commented on how good Clemson (4-1, 3-0 ACC) has looked during its current four-game winning streak following the season-opening loss to Georgia.
Clemson and Miami don’t play each other during the regular season, and Klatt doesn’t think the Hurricanes want to see the Tigers in the ACC title game, either.
“If you look at what they’ve done since Georgia – and was that good? No, it wasn’t. Their loss to Georgia, it wasn’t,” Klatt said. “But if you look at what they’ve done – they’ve grown, they’ve gotten better, they’ve developed, and now all of a sudden, they’ve got Garrett Riley as their offensive coordinator, and Cade Klubnik. They can run the football, and all of a sudden they’re the No. 3 scoring offense in all of college football since that loss to Georgia, scoring 48 points per game.
“Like, who wants to play ‘em? I can guarantee you, you know who doesn’t want to play Clemson? Miami.”