Dabo Swinney reacts to 5-star RB Demarkcus Bowman transferring to Florida
While Florida was on the field playing South Carolina, some big news broke about a future Gator.
Demarkcus Bowman, a 5-star running back in the class of 2020, announced his plans to transfer from Clemson to Florida. Bowman’s announcement came roughly 48 hours after news broke Thursday that he was entering the NCAA transfer portal.
Clemson, minus Bowman, played Virginia on Saturday. After the Tigers’ win over UVA, coach Dabo Swinney was asked about Bowman’s decision to leave Clemson.
“Oh, super disappointed,” Swinney told reporters, per 247Sports. “Great young man and very, very disappointed. He’s a good kid, but he just said he wanted to be closer to home and we just wish him well and, certainly, didn’t have him long — just a couple months — but certainly appreciate the opportunity that we had to work with him a little bit and, hopefully, he’ll get in a good situation and become the player that I know he can be.”
After the portal news broke, Bowman told a Clemson publication that he wanted to be closer to his hometown of Lakeland, Florida after losing both of his grandfathers. Bowman stated that he chose Clemson so that his grandfather in Atlanta could go to his games.
Swinney shared that when Bowman came to talk to him, the coach tried to talk the 5-star freshman into staying at Clemson.
“Oh, yeah — yeah, didn’t expect that,” Swinney said of Bowman’s decision to transfer. “But yeah, it’s 2020. There’s a lot of things that’ll catch you off guard in 2020. I tried to talk him out of it, but it’s just what he wanted to do and it’s really easy to do that — and it’s going to get easier with the transfer portal and those types of things. It’ll get easier and easier for guys to just pack up and go, so it’s the world we’re living in. But he’s a great kid, again. Certainly no hard feelings or anything like that. But at the end of the day, you’ve got just keep moving forward.”
Bowman told Swamp247 he will finish his fall classes at Clemson and plans to enroll at UF in January.