‘No reason to believe’ football team implicated after FBI trial comments, Clemson says
The Clemson Board of Trustees met Friday morning and approved several new contracts in the athletics department, including a new 10-year deal for head football coach Dabo Swinney that makes him the second-highest paid college football coach in the country.
Up until Thursday afternoon, the board was also set to approve new contracts for assistant men’s basketball coaches, but that was put on hold after Clemson’s football team, Zion Williamson and the Tigers’ men’s basketball team were brought into the discussion during the FBI trial related to college basketball corruption in New York.
Clemson assistant basketball coach Steve Smith was caught on a wiretap discussing the recruitment of Williamson, as well as the Clemson football program, according to testimony from the trial. Tigers Athletics Director Dan Radakovich responded to that testimony on Friday following the board of trustees meeting.
“Disappointed. I think that college athletics is college athletics. There are a lot of schools around the country that are dealing with this right now. My big thing is, if we’re gonna deal with it we’re going to do it in an upfront and transparent way,” Radakovich said. “We’re gonna make the best decision for Clemson. That’s what we’re looking to do.”
Radakovich was unaware that Smith had made any comments on wiretap until initial reports started coming out on Twitter early Thursday afternoon.
Smith spoke about the “recruitment and potential payments to be made to Zion Williamson’s family” and also said of the Clemson football program: “That’s why football is so successful, is if you do it and use resources at Clemson, like you can really keep everything tight,” according to updates from Matt Norlander of CBSSports.
“I think we feel very strongly that those were unfortunate comments,” Radakovich said Friday. “We are doing our due diligence, but there is no reason to believe, and nothing that we have been able to find at this point in time, that implicates the football program in any of it. It was a very unfortunate choice of words.”
Radakovich has yet to meet with Smith, although that is set to happen in the coming days. Smith is under a one-year contract that expires Tuesday.
He did speak briefly Thursday with head basketball coach Brad Brownell, and the two agreed to put off new contracts for assistants for now.
“The board will have some other opportunities here shortly to pull together,” Radakovich said. “We need to just kind of do a few things that weren’t able to be handled quickly because of a lot of people being spread out and focused on this particular meeting. So we wanted to make sure to get that done and we’ll talk about (contracts) in the days to come.”
Radakovich also spoke with Swinney on Thursday.
“Kind of let him know what we’re doing and our background. Of course Dabo reiterated what I think we all knew, that there’s no issue related to the football program from this standpoint,” Radakovich said. “So we’ll just continue to talk to coach Smith, find out what he knows, how he did it, why he did it, what the comments meant. Then we’ll begin to make a decision as to where we need to go. And it’ll be done quickly.”
This story was originally published April 26, 2019 at 1:33 PM.