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Swinney: Clemson may have accidentally given players banned substance

Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images Sport / Getty

Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney admitted there's a chance the university may have accidentally given their players a banned substance prior to the Cotton Bowl on Dec. 29.

Dexter Lawrence, Braden Galloway, and Zach Giella tested positive for the banned performance-enhancing drug ostarine, and were suspended for the Cotton Bowl and the College Football Playoff National Championship.

"Oh yeah, I mean, there’s a chance that it could come from anything,” Swinney said when asked if the players potentially ingested the drug through a Clemson-issued supplement, according to Grace Raynor and Gene Sapakoff of The Post and Courier. "They’re going to test everything and look at everything. And that’s the problem. As you really look at this stuff, it could be a contaminant that came from anything, that was something that was cleared and not a problem, and all of a sudden, it becomes there was something."

Officials from the program did not verify which supplements were given to the players over the course of the season.

“You can research articles, there are a lot of times when things are cleared and end up having a contaminant in it because of where it was processed, the factory it came from, whether there were other things there," Swinney said. "So there’s a lot of that. There’s a case out there that there was a contaminant at a testing lab. There are lots of different things and the legal people are involved in that."

All three players were suspended for the 2019 season, but Lawrence declared for the 2019 NFL Draft.

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