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E-mail Ask the Tigers

May 10, 2000

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Craig Fuller, Perth, Australia

It appeared during the football recruiting season that Clemson offered more scholarships than were available. Was this the case? Please explain the process that is used to coordinate the offers with available number of scholarships.

 

Bobby Robinson’s Answer

That basically is correct. We have done that and every school in division I does that and not just in football, but in basically in all the sports. What we are doing is, we probably start with 3,000 names in football and then reduce it down to 200 recruitable student-athletes and then we will bring in about 55 on official visits. We will offer to not all of those 55, but as the visits go along we’ll reduce it down. But, we always offer more scholarships and you have to do that because everybody is not going to accept your offers. It is really not like going to buy a car, where you decide which car you are going to pick. It is the other way around. The student-athlete is deciding which school they will pick and they have multiple offers. Some of them have 15 to 20 offers, some of them have two or three or four offers. So you really have to make sure that you have a priority list and even a secondary list. That is just the nature of the beast, so we do offer more than we actually have, but we do that in every sport. In the end, you don’t bring in more than the scholarships, because it always works out. Sometimes you make offers to three people and you will tell each one of them that the first person that accepts the offer receives it. Then the offer is good for that person and the other offers have to be withdrawn. You try to move the process along in those terms, but sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

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