CLEMSON — There is no doubt Dabo Swinney and the Clemson Tigers should have done more in the transfer portal than they did.

You can make a very good argument they should have been more aggressive on the offensive side of the football than they were.

However, the Tigers were aggressive on the defensive side of the ball. They brought in pretty good players like Elliott Washington II, Jerome Carter III, Corey Myrick, Markus Strong, London Merritt, Kourtney Kelly and a couple of others.

They also had the top linebacker in the portal in Luke Ferrelli, who was the ACC Rookie of the Year from California. With Ferrelli in the fold, the Clemson defense, at least on paper, looked like a Clemson defense from the past.

But then came Ole Miss playing dirty. With Ferrelli already enrolled at Clemson, taking classes and participating in team activities, Ole Miss head coach Pete Golding backed up the Brink’s truck and figuratively threw the money at Ferrelli.

Shocker, a 20-year-old kid took the money and ran. I do not blame Ferrelli at all in this matter. He did what most of us would do in his situation – he took the money and ran all the way to Oxford.

But Swinney was not letting this go. As we all know, the Clemson coach threw it all out there in a January press conference that was supposed to name Chad Morris as the Tigers’ new offensive coordinator.

Swinney detailed the whole situation involving Ferrelli and did not hold back. He accused Golding and the Ole Miss program of tampering, provided evidence of such and turned the Rebels over to the NCAA.

Finally, after nearly three months of silence, Golding got his chance to rebuttal and defend himself and his program. You know what he did, he did nothing.

“There’s two sides to every story,” Golding said on Tuesday when asked by an Ole Miss reporter if he wanted to respond. “I’m not going to sit up here and use the podium as a grandstand and all of that. That’s why there is enforcement. That’s why we have our compliance office. They do all that.”

Sure!

If you did nothing wrong, you do not use a podium in front of the media to defend yourself or the program. Yeah, who would do that?

Wait!

This is the time, if you are innocent of the alleged allegations, to defend yourself. Standing at a podium, in front of the media, is what moments like these are for.

The media is made to hold people accountable for their actions, so if Dabo Swinney was wrong, this was Golding’s chance to use the same approach Swinney did and outline why Clemson was in the wrong.

But he did not. Instead, he basically said nothing, which, in reality, said everything.

Have you ever heard that saying, “Silence speaks a thousand words”?

You know that moment, some of you do anyway, when you catch your ex in a lie or you catch them doing something they should not have, but they were too ashamed to say anything or admit the truth.

That’s sort of what Golding did. He was caught, figuratively, with his pants down and had nothing to say while he was pulling them back up.