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1. The faster others go, the more Clemson slows down.

We have long framed Dabo Swinney’s program as countercultural in many aspects – the manner in which it recruits being a chief one.

College football recruiting has carried on through the pandemic, as it always stood to. Teams want new players, see the need for new players, and there’s a fresh batch of high school seniors needing homes. That the chain moved right along seemed a surprise to some people, but that’s another story.

What it actually did was speed up the process. Without visits to arrange on the calendar, all prospects had were a flood of Zoom calls to deal with, and only so much can be said – or, in some cases, tolerated. Prospects saw the value in making their reservation, and college coaches leveraged finite class space to get commitments in the boat.

All in all, most schools filled the majority of their class earlier than normal, with a few spots left for stragglers. Clemson's staff had accomplished most of its work on the front end of the cycle and was in position to wait out verdicts for a handful of select targets. A couple of vacancies in this class could still be in play, but more on that in a bit.

Sentiment we expressed from the get-go was that the greater impact for Clemson would fall with 2022 recruiting.

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That didn’t necessarily mean the results would look much different. But how the Tigers’ class comes together probably would, and the evidence has started mounting in support.