

That’s a larger number than the vast majority of Power 5 programs, and the Tigers put them to good use. “They’ve got the most money and the most people.” “They’ve got a ton of people in their building,” one coach said.
Football signals code#
Among the group are 15 analysts or graduate assistants, which is usually where teams employ their code breakers. The page includes names and faces of 74 people (although they no longer list the pilots for the team’s charter flights, which had been a feature of past Clemson staff listings). The school has gone all-in on football spending, and it shows in both its facilities and the staff page on the Clemson football website. What makes Clemson so good at the art of the steal? Primarily this: a massive staff that can allocate time and resources to the craft. Especially when the opposing team is Clemson, which has the talent to run up scores on just about anyone if it so chooses. While signal stealing is a commonly accepted element of the sport that violates no written rules, it does traipse into the sportsmanship gray area-and coaches are loath to talk about opposing teams in that regard.

Nobody is denying it, but no Clemson opponents have been eager to talk publicly about it, either.

If you have an opponent who’s basically screaming out, ‘Hey, we’re running the ball,’ well, that’s an advantage.” You’re competing and you want to get every edge that you can. … It’s not a very well-kept secret.” A year earlier, head coach Dabo Swinney tacitly acknowledged the hustle in a story in the Raleigh News & Observer, saying, “You’re in a competition. In its 2017 college football preview magazine, Athlon Sports quoted an anonymous coach saying, “They’ll steal your signals. This isn’t the first time the topic has arisen.
