Clemson football staffers throw shade after QB recruit flips commitment to Notre Dame

Because of long-standing NCAA rules, Clemson football coaches and staffers cannot make any public comments about unsigned high school recruits.

On Monday night, though, a number of people within the program — including coach Dabo Swinney — got their message across loud and clear after the Tigers’ recruiting Class of 2025 suffered an out-of-the-blue quarterback decommitment.

Earlier Monday evening, four-star 2025 quarterback recruit Blake Hebert, who’d committed to Clemson last summer as a rising junior, announced in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that he was decommitting from the Tigers.

Six minutes later, he revealed his next destination: Notre Dame.

“Notre Dame is where my heart is,” Hebert, the No. 29 quarterback and No. 400 overall recruit in the class, told 247Sports after his announcement. “As I got to know them more, it felt more comfortable. I was committed to Clemson so I wasn’t talking to them, but then we started (talking recently) and I got to know them more.”

Hebert’s abrupt decommitment, which left the Tigers without a quarterback recruit in their 2025 class roughly two months before the early signing period, drew widespread frustration from Clemson fans on social media.

Within hours, though, Swinney and others in the football program gave a not-so-subtle response to Hebert flipping his commitment, which has been a rare occurrence in Clemson’s recruiting.

About two hours after Hebert’s decommitment, Swinney got a text question on his weekly radio show from a fan asking if recruiting in 2024 was still relationship-driven or if it was more transactional now, given the influence of name, image and likeness (NIL) money.

While acknowledging the influence of NIL, Swinney said in response that recruiting is still “very much relational” at Clemson and he doesn’t “ever see it not being that way here. I really don’t. I mean, this is just the culture we have.”

He added: “Recruiting is fickle. It can change at a moment’s notice. But I don’t ever really get too emotional about it, because I’ve been doing it a long time. Some of the guys that I was so disappointed with was the best thing that ever happened to us.”

As in?

“In that some of the guys we got because we didn’t get someone else, it’s the best thing that ever happened to us,” Swinney said. “God’s gonna bring the right ones here, and that’s just how I’ve always looked at it.”

Swinney has repeated that mantra often, including last year when discussing the breakout freshman season of receiver Tyler Brown. He was a late flip from Minnesota to Clemson in the 2022 recruiting cycle after the Tigers had a spot open up from a decommitment.

On Monday night, though, in context of Hebert’s recent decommitment, Swinney’s comments gained traction on social media — and got a co-sign from his recruiting coordinator in public fashion.

Tyler Grisham, who is also Clemson’s wide receivers coach, reshared a post from a reporter that recapped Swinney’s quote about decommitments shortly after Clemson’s coach made the comment Monday night.

The reporter’s post mentioned Hebert by name. Coaches are allowed to share such posts as long as they don’t comment.

Grisham and a number of other Clemson recruiting staffers, including director of player personnel Zach Fulmer, also reshared a Monday night post from Clemson 2025 tight end commit Logan Brooking that was aimed at sending a message after Hebert’s decommitment.

The photo from Brooking (which has been used by Clemson offensive line coach Matt Luke in the past) showed a crowd of dozens of people walking to the left of a fork in the road, while a singular person walked to the right toward a Clemson logo and the school’s football stadium.

His post also included the Bible verse Matthew 7:13-14, which reads: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

Dabo updates QB recruiting

Hebert had initially committed to Clemson in June 2023 as a three-star recruit out of Central Catholic High School in Lawrence, Massachusetts and had been one of the more active and vocal recruiters among players in the Tigers’ Class of 2025.

Halfway through his senior year at Greenwich School in Connecticut, though, Hebert (6-foot-3, 215 pounds) has risen up the charts and currently ranks as the No. 29 QB and No. 400 overall recruit in the 247Sports Composite.

At the midway point of his senior year, Hebert had 1,138 passing yards and 15 passing touchdowns for a Greenwich team that started 5-0.

ESPN reported that Notre Dame and coach Marcus Freeman had been “aggressive in their pursuit” to find another 2025 quarterback commit after five-star QB Deuce Knight flipped from the Fighting Irish to Auburn at the beginning of the month.

“Marcus Freeman & Co. found one in Hebert, now bound for South Bend, Indiana, through a late-cycle recruitment led by Notre Dame quarterbacks coach and pass game coordinator Gino Guidugli,” ESPN’s Eli Lederman wrote.

With Hebert’s decommitment, Clemson’s 2025 recruiting class has 13 commits and ranks No. 19 in the 247Sports team composite rankings.

Swinney was asked during his weekly news conference Tuesday if the Tigers planned to pursue another 2025 quarterback recruit.

“We love the three quarterbacks we have,” Swinney said, going on to rave about star junior quarterback Cade Klubnik and backup quarterbacks Christopher Vizzina and Trent Pearman, all of whom he’s anticipating will return in 2025.

But “we’d love to get a guy” for 2025, Swinney said. “We will. We’ll definitely probably take a quarterback in the ’25 class of some sort. Right now, (transfer) Paul Tyson is our fourth guy. Love Paul Tyson. So is it a Paul Tyson-type guy or a high school kid? I don’t know. We’ll see how that all plays out. But the main thing is we need to keep those three guys.”