Tampering Discussion with Duke Tears as a Dessert

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Clemson coach Dabo Swinney sat down at a news conference on Jan. 23 armed with receipts, timelines and accusations.

Coaches have griped for years about the out-of-control nature of tampering across college football. But this was a rarity: A head coach going public with precisely how his program was wronged. And not just any coach, but one with two national title rings.

He laid out the story of Luke Ferrelli, a transfer linebacker from Cal who had just enrolled at his school, moved into an apartment and went through classes and workouts for a week. And then, suddenly, he bailed for more money at Ole Miss.

What changed? Swinney alleged new Ole Miss coach Pete Golding texted Ferrelli while he was in his 8 a.m. class to say, "I know you're signed. What's the buyout?" Swinney claims Golding even sent a photo of a $1 million contract offer. Within two days, Ferrelli was back in the portal.

"To me, this situation is like having an affair on your honeymoon," Swinney said

Coaches have traditionally been reluctant to publicly go this far when their players get tampered with and swiped by other programs. By now, most recognize the inherent hypocrisy: It's throwing stones from glass houses.

"We're doing it ourselves, too," an ACC general manager said. "If we're doing it, we're not going to turn other people in for it."

But it's different for Swinney. Clemson stayed on the sidelines for the first six years of transfer portal recruiting until last year, giving Swinney some moral high ground on this issue. He can safely call out what's wrong. More importantly, he's calling on the NCAA to do something about it.

"We're never going to get this under control until we start having some consequences," Swinney said. "We're just not. It's that simple."

ESPN surveyed more than a dozen general managers and agents about the current state of tampering in college football amid the Clemson-Ole Miss feud. They were granted anonymity in exchange for their candor.

The aim was not to throw more stones but to demystify the process: How does tampering actually work in 2026? What are the unwritten rules, and when are you breaking those rules?

We'll break it down into three levels: Tampering 101 (communicating with players before they enter the portal), 201 (making deals with players before they enter the portal) and 301 (what Clemson accused Ole Miss of doing).

Any contact between a player and school before they've entered the transfer portal is impermissible, but agents arriving on the scene in this evolving era of NIL totally changed the game. Now it's easier than ever to pursue a player at another school via their representation, with those conversations starting well before the season ends.

The agent-GM relationship combined with the advent of revenue sharing has dramatically changed tampering over these last two offseasons, both in terms of tactics and the shifting perception of what is considered fair game.

The NCAA is now threatening a crackdown on the rampant pre-portal dealings between agents and schools. But in a time when seemingly nobody is living in fear of enforcement, the real rules and ethics of tampering are being made up on the fly and up for debate. Granted, that's not how Clemson's coach sees it.

"Right is right even if nobody does it," Swinney said. "And wrong is wrong even if everybody does it."

College football transfer portal tampering: How does it work?

Tampering 101, 201 and 301: What is considered OK, and what crosses the line in college football?

www.espn.com

Lots of interesting quotes in here. Just posting the beginning and ending which contains the relevant part about Miami.

Tampering 301: By any means necessary​

The Clemson-Ole Miss spat raises a curious question about the tampering game: What do GMs and agents consider crossing the line?

Most surveyed by ESPN believe Golding having direct communication with Ferrelli after the linebacker enrolled at Clemson would be a brazen move by a head coach. If the player is signed and in school, it's time to move on.

"Once the kid gets on campus, that s--- has got to stop," an SEC GM said. "To me, that was the cardinal sin in that situation."

"He's literally in class," an agent added. "There's no way to defend it."

Swinney also claimed that Trinidad Chambliss and Jaxson Dart -- Ole Miss' starting quarterbacks over the past two seasons -- were involved in texting Ferrelli to recruit him to Ole Miss. GMs view that as a bit of a gray area, depending on if you can prove the coaching staff orchestrated those efforts. As one ACC GM put it, "It's not not a violation."

General managers would prefer to operate in a world where returning players and incoming transfers are off-limits once they've officially signed their revenue sharing contracts. But in the final days of the portal window, they watched several schools get desperate. In Ole Miss' case, the Ferrelli recruitment accelerated after the Rebels lost starting linebacker TJ Dottery to LSU.

Swinney's retelling of the saga did raise a few eyebrows among GMs and agents. Several acknowledged Ole Miss' pursuit of Ferrelli could've ended with the player's agent, Ryan Williams of Athletes First, shutting it down from the start. Some questioned why Clemson didn't have Ferrelli locked down with a signed revenue sharing contract, which would've given the school a legal avenue to seek a buyout or damages after his flip.

"It's Clemson's **** fault for not having the contract done," one agent argued. "If you know all this is going on, what's taking you so long to execute the contract?"

The Ferrelli situation was not one of a kind in this portal cycle. Multiple GMs told ESPN they had players who had already re-signed get contacted by Power 4 schools inquiring about the cost of their buyout. The agents generally viewed breaking contracts as too problematic to pursue and guaranteed to burn relationships with schools. Some said they would even drop the player as a client if put in that position.

One ACC GM felt the Ferrelli move was nowhere near as troubling as Miami swiping star quarterback Darian Mensah from Duke at the portal deadline. The Hurricanes' last-minute push to flip Mensah away from the ACC champs resulted in Duke suing the quarterback and settling for an undisclosed sum to release him from his two-year contract.

"It's like they robbed a bank in broad daylight, walked out with no mask and no alarms went off," the ACC GM said with a chuckle.

One month after Swinney's news conference, NCAA vice president of enforcement Jon Duncan sent a memo to member schools warning that his group has been charged with pursuing "significant penalties" for tampering violations -- including any contact between agents and coaches about players who are not in the portal. He vowed work is underway to modernize and streamline the investigative process for more expedited resolutions.

"Simply put, communicating with an agent for a student-athlete who is not in the transfer portal is a tampering violation," Duncan wrote.

The NCAA says its enforcement team processed around 90 impermissible contact cases last year, including major infractions by Oklahoma State's women's tennis program and UCLA's cross country and track programs.

There have been few high-profile cases of Power 4 programs receiving NCAA penalties for tampering, though Iowa did get punished for contacting Michigan quarterback Cade McNamara before he entered the portal in 2022. The penalties included coach Kirk Ferentz and an assistant serving one-game suspensions -- two years after the violation occurred.

GMs surveyed by ESPN said they haven't turned in other programs for tampering in recent years because they view it as a waste of time. It's not easy to obtain evidence and prove it like Swinney did. More importantly, staffers don't want the NCAA imaging their phones and finding proof of their own tampering efforts.

That's one of the many challenges Duncan and his enforcement staff deal with: Coaches call the NCAA toothless but aren't interested in cooperating and turning over actionable information.

"Nobody's clean -- except maybe Dabo," the Group of 5 GM said.

Swinney turned over what Clemson has to the NCAA but contended this case ought to take three days, not three months or three years. There's another age-old problem for the NCAA: Schools expect instant justice and draconian penalties when they're the accuser and expect fair processes and penalties negotiated down to the point of being painless when accused.

After years of perceived investigative inaction, GMs and agents say they'll believe a reckoning is coming when they see it.

"I hate to say it," one agent argued, "but the rules are a suggestion at this point."

"Let's say they do penalize Ole Miss or one of these teams," an SEC GM added. "At the end of the day, it's still going to end up in a courtroom."

Yet another challenge for Duncan and his staff in confronting tampering in major college football: Does membership want to treat this like speeding tickets with a higher volume of Level III violations? Or do they want more significant consequences even if it means fewer cases?

The Big 12 GM believes it's time to start talking about dramatic penalties and argued that programs busted for significant tampering shouldn't be eligible for the College Football Playoff or the postseason.

"There's got to be some type of functional repercussion to it in order for people to stop doing it," he argued.

The NCAA's FBS Oversight Committee offered a window into its thought process last month when it shared proposed penalties for trying to prevent "blind transfers," preparing for the likelihood that teams will try to convince players to transfer later this spring by circumventing the portal.

The threat to teams that try it? A six-game suspension for the head coach, a fine of 20% of the school's football budget and a reduction of five roster spots for next year.

Tulane pulled this off last July when it brought in former BYU quarterback Jake Retzlaff as a walk-on enrollee months after the transfer deadline. Teams will inevitably have needs after dealing with injuries and depth issues in spring practice. One agent said schools have already talked with him about orchestrating these moves.

Note that this ESPN story leaves out the fact that Duke tampered with Mensash; which put Tulane in the situation where it needed to get another quarterback; and additionally they left out the occasion when Xavier Lucas had to enroll at UMiami because Wisconsin wouldn’t put him in the portal in the first place.

"They're saying have him withdraw from school, he'll walk on over here, then we'll pay him and put him on a scholarship a few days later," the agent said.

If those penalties are approved by the Division I cabinet next month, they'll likely face legal challenges. But it would send a clear message the NCAA is willing to embrace more significant measures as a deterrence.


Tampering has become so easy to do that trying to stop it might be futile. Perhaps it's wiser to confront some of the contributing factors such as fixing the calendar, regulating agents or dealing with the schools who are spending far beyond the revenue sharing cap.

Or, perhaps, it's finally moving in the direction of employee status for players and collective bargaining. By the end of his 90-minute news conference, Clemson's head coach admitted he had started to come around to that conclusion, too. Of course, Swinney just said what many are thinking. The current setup has left everyone grasping for answers to a complex problem.

"It's like trying to stop a runaway train, man," an ACC GM said.

 

[StPeteCane]

So enjoyable to read Dabo whining.