On Wednesday, the NCAA made the decision to extend its recruiting dead period through May 31 after initially suspending all in-person recruiting until at least April 15 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even though prospects can’t visit college campuses right now, and coaches won’t be able to visit high schools to see prospects this spring as they usually would have, Dabo Swinney nonetheless feels good about how things are going for his program in recruiting.

“Recruiting is great,” Clemson’s head coach said during a media teleconference Friday.

With that said, Swinney does wish the Tigers had the chance to host recruits for their spring game, which was originally scheduled for tomorrow, April 4, but of course won’t be played now.

Typically, Clemson welcomes a big group of top prospects to campus every year for the spring game, which essentially serves as the program’s third “junior day” of the year.

On the bright side, the Tigers were able to hold junior day functions for class of 2021 recruits on Jan. 25 and March 7, and the good news for them is most of their priority targets have visited the school at least once in the past.

“To be honest with you, we missed our spring game,” Swinney said. “That’s always a huge opportunity for us. We would have had a lot of recruits on campus tomorrow. But we’ve had two big junior days. We’ve already got 10 commits. We’re probably only going to sign about 18 guys in this class, so we’re very focused on who we want to fill those spots. Most of the guys have been on campus for us already. We certainly wish we could have had today, tomorrow for a lot of reasons. First of all, very few people can get 70,000 people in a stadium and create an unbelievable game atmosphere for our team. But it’s also awesome for recruiting, so we miss that.”

Also, in a normal year, Clemson would have sent coaches on the road to check out recruits during the spring evaluation period, which was scheduled for April 15 through May 31.

The spring evaluation period is a time the Tigers would have used to not only visit top targets in the 2021 class but also scout prospects they are interested in for the next cycle.

“The biggest difference is when the spring game would have been over, we would have spent the next two weeks doing our exit meetings and some of our post-spring stuff, and then the coaches would have hit the road for the month of May and got a chance to go out to the schools and watch practice and so forth,” Swinney said. “You can’t talk to them, but you could go and see them in person and those type of things. But that’s not going to happen. Usually we didn’t have a lot of guys coming on campus in May, anyway, because we’re all on the road in May. Our next big time to get everybody on campus is in June for camps, so the biggest change is not being able to go out on the road in May.”

Just because the Tigers can’t evaluate recruits in person doesn’t mean they’re not continuing to evaluate them. In fact, all the down time has allowed Clemson’s staff to watch even more film of prospects than they might have otherwise.

“Our evaluation process has been really, really good,” Swinney said. “We’ve spent a lot of time evaluating on all the tape. We do that anyway, but we’ve been able to have just even more time as a staff to do that stuff.”

While there won’t be any face-to-face contact between coaches and recruits until at least the end of May, the two parties can still talk as much as they want via phone calls, text messages, DMs, FaceTime, Skype, etc.

And Swinney and his staff are doing plenty of that during quarantine.

“It’s just kind of part of our daily routine,” Swinney said. “I had a kid FaceTime me last night. Pretty much every day, I’m talking to somebody. Either somebody’s FaceTiming me or I’m texting them. So, recruiting is going very well, and again our class is off to a great start for 2021 and I don’t have any doubt we’re going to finish it up with a great group of guys that we’re targeting, and hopefully we’ll be able to get guys back on campus this summer and all that stuff. But it’s going very well.”

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