Josh Pate Comments on a Major Difference Between Clemson and Florida State

How big of a difference does the Transfer Portal make at the end of a season? Does a couple of players leaving and a handful of guys coming in give a team the necessary talent to either maintain where they want to be or close the gap enough to make the jump to the next tier? An interesting case study in the ACC may give us some answers to those questions.

Josh Pate spoke in a segment on his show - Late Kick Live with Josh Pate - about the stark philosophical difference between the constant king of the ACC in Clemson and the rising challenger in Florida State. "It's like the great ACC experiment continuing over there because since Mike Norvell got to Florida State," Pate said. "FSU has become Clemson's biggest competition for ACC supremacy and that certainly will be on display this year. Yet, you could not go about things any more opposite than those two have. Since Mike Norvell has come to Tallahassee they have taken 46 kids out of the transfer portal. In the same period of time, Clemson has taken 2."

"And what does it result in?" Pate continued. "They got about the same odds to win the title this year. They play that game in Clemson. Clemson will be a very, very slight favorite. Basically, a home-field advantage, and oddsmakers are saying have at it. We're watching this experiment right along with the rest of you. Just fascinating! Always is to watch different coaches go about it in different ways. This is not a surprise or anything like that. It's not like if I told Dabo Swinney, 'Hey you know you guys only took 1 guy out of the portal?' He'd say, 'What?!' No, he knows that. That's their approach. They're very intentional about it. I'm just...it's not the way I do things but I don't run Clemson."

Every college coach in America is trying to determine how much to use this new approach to the sport they love that also probably goes against a lot of what they were taught coming up through the ranks on team building. Clemson is looking to be the one to prove that the old ways still work. We'll all see soon whether Dabo Swinney is right.