It was not a bad weekend for the Clemson Football program.
Beginning with Nate Wiggins’ No. 30 selection in the first round by the Baltimore Ravens on Thursday night and ending with Tyler Davis going No. 196 in the sixth round to the Los Angeles Rams on Saturday, six former Tigers were selected in the 2024 NFL Draft.
The six selections in this year’s draft ranked 11 th nationally and second in the ACC. Besides Wiggins and Davis, Ruke Orhorhoro (35 overall), Will Shipley (127), Xavier Thomas (138) and Jeremiah Trotter (155) were also drafted by NFL teams.
Orhorhoro was picked up in the second round by the Atlanta Falcons in Day 2 on Friday, while Shipley was the first Clemson player selected on Day 3 when the Eagles snatched him up in the fourth round. Thomas was also picked in the fourth round by Arizona, while Trotter was picked up by the team where his dad earned All-Pro status – the Philadelphia Eagles.
The six selections, including one first-round pick, give Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney 83 draft picks in his head coaching tenure, including 18 first-round picks. Swinney leads all active coaches in both categories since the first NFL Draft of his tenure in April of 2009.
With Shipley, Thomas, Trotter and Davis all being drafted on Saturday, it meant all six of the players that were expected to be picked up by NFL teams in the draft were selected. The six Tigers selected tied for the fifth most in school history.
Wiggins represented Clemson’s 16th first-round pick since the 2014 NFL Draft, the most in the ACC. Clemson’s 16 first-round picks in that span are double the amount of the next closest program, which belongs to Florida State with eight.
“Nate is as talented as we’ve ever had come through here at his position from a skill set standpoint,” Swinney said. “He’s really honed his craft from when I first met him. He’s a really competitive kid, and how he channeled his competitiveness, he’s really developed.”
Clemson has now produced at least one first-round pick in 10 of the last 12 drafts, standing alongside Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Ohio State as the only programs in the nation to do so.
In the last 22 years, Clemson has had at least one player selected in the NFL Draft, adding to Clemson’s second-longest such streak. Clemson previously had at least one player selected in the NFL Draft every year across the 1951-74 NFL Drafts, a span of 24 years.
With Orhorhoro being picked at No. 35 by the Falcons in the second round, Clemson has produced selections in both the first and second round for the 10th time in school history. The last time it happened was in 2021.
“The thing that everybody likes about Ruke is that he’s not quite a blank canvas, but he still very much has his best football in front of him,” Swinney said. “He’s a guy that didn’t start playing football until his junior year of high school. Watching him develop at Clemson every single year, to me, Ruke is a great example to a lot of kids in today’s world that if you’ll just stay and put the work in, if you’ve got the talent then you will develop.”
In all, Clemson produced four defensive players in the 2024 NFL Draft. It marked the eighth time since the NFL went to the seven-round format in 1994 that Clemson produced at least four defensive selections in a single draft and all, but one (1999) occurred under Swinney. Clemson entered the 2024 NFL Draft as one of only six schools to have produced at least 45 defensive draft picks since the 2009 NFL Draft, Alabama, LSU, Ohio State, Georgia and Florida are the others.
Clemson produced multiple defensive draft picks for the 13th time in 16 drafts in the Swinney era. Clemson, LSU, Alabama, Ohio State and Georgia are the only programs to produce multiple draft picks from their defenses in at least 13 drafts in that span.
— Clemson Athletic Communications Contributed to this story
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