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1. Within minutes and certainly hours of college football's season end, there is no shortage of aptly labeled "way too early" preseason top 25s for the next year.
A more reliable forecast would be predicting the top 10 recruiting classes for this new cycle.
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At No. 7 overall, Clemson is coming off its fourth consecutive top-10 class and just missed its fifth top-five finish over the last six years.
With the way the Rivals.com formula computes, the Tigers would have been No. 3 in the country if they had just taken another warm body rated mid-three star or higher.
We can cite individual instances where the pandemic might have hurt Clemson's shot.
But the data supports Clemson is recruiting as well, if not better, than it has during the Dabo Swinney era.
Since the NCAA imposed travel restrictions precluding in-person visits, the Tigers have landed 14 prospects with a 3.928 average star rating -- including three four-stars to christen the 2022 class.
That coaches' saying about defense travels.
Dominance travels in recruiting.
Thus the perennial playoff participants and national title contenders -- Alabama, Clemson and Ohio State -- retain the lead spots on the food chain, even if via Zoom and FaceTime.
UGA is going to post another top class with how it recruits, and LSU won't be far behind. Mario Cristobal has lived up to all the talk about giving Oregon an SEC recruiting presence and will be up there as well, while as we've expressed, collecting stars has never been Jimbo Fisher's issue and won't be this cycle either coming off Texas A&M's season. USC consistently yields high per-prospect returns on the West Coast, and no one would be surprised to see Texas infiltrate top-10 territory.
Clemson will be in that company, with its position between Nos. 3-10 likely dictated as much by how many signees Swinney elects to bring in.
2. Which brings us to the fourth transfer portal entrant the Tigers have had this offseason.
