1. You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.
The second and final three-day session of the Dabo Swinney Camp would have come to a close last week – always a highlight on the recruiting calendar.
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For yours truly, the Swinney Camps are a frenetic blur. From dawn through dusk, prospects come and go amid the seemingly infinite herd of participants. Who’s coming, who’s not coming, tracking the visit and performance returns, scurrying for and sorting hundreds of photos daily, plus the social media component and our actual content production – time for a nap just thinking about.
But man, therein lies the fun, too.
We reflected last week on just how many Clemson football stories can trace their roots to the Swinney Camps.
This observer can still recall Swinney crouching to the side of a quarterbacks line, intently watching rising high school sophomore Deshaun Watson go through a footwork drill before his recruiting profile would explode. Trevor Lawrence, same age, visiting campus and hanging out with Watson as Clemson first planted its seeds in that recruitment.