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Almost two years ago Tigerillustrated.com sat down with several key members of Clemson's football program to get a behind-the-scenes look at head football coach Dabo Swinney.
By request, Tigerillustrated.com is re-releasing these LENGTHY, one-on-one interviews as part of our College Football Playoff week content lineup.
We would also like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas! -- Owner-Publisher, Cris Ard
PART 3: Senior writer Larry Williams sits down with Woody McCorvey, Clemson's associate athletics director for football administration and one of Swinney’s main confidantes.
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I coached Dabo at Alabama when he was a walk-on wide receiver, so I’ve known him a long time. And the biggest thing about his leadership is simple: He’s himself. He’s pulled a lot of different things from a lot of different people to help him do what he needs to do to lead this program. Sitting here working with him every day and seeing him run everything, he’s still himself. He’s never changed in that regard.
I was in charge of the receivers and the tight ends at Alabama, and we had a great group that loved to come to work every day, a great culture that was infectious and went from that room through the whole team. And Dabo was a big part of that. He showed me something early, even when we were struggling, that made me want to make him a part of the rotation and play. When we put him on the Alabama staff full time, I knew he was going to be a success at recruiting because of his personality and how well he got along with people. I watched him interact with his teammates’ parents when they were on campus, and I knew he was going to be able to take that and use it as a very positive tool in being able to recruit.
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He’s also always had an exceptional eye for talent. Sometimes people say, “This prospect is not a top-rated guy.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. There’s a difference in a guy running fast and playing fast. In my career I’ve seen too many guys that were track guys who could run fast but it didn’t translate into being a football player.
I look at players here like Grady Jarrett, who wasn’t a very highly recruited guy. Some of our defensive staff didn’t want to take him. But Dabo said, “Hey, I observed this kid in camp and we’re going to take him.” And the rest is history. Look at a guy like Vic Beasley. When he got here we couldn’t find a place for him to play. So Dabo kept moving him around, and eventually Marion Hobby said, “I’ll take him.” So we put him over there, and look what turned out with him. Those are some of the traits that he has that have worked very well and have allowed him to have the success he’s having right now as a head coach.
He’s very detailed, and that is nothing new. I always noticed that about him as a player. Some coaches when they’re planning, they might go from month-to-month and some might go quarterly and some might go half a year. It amazes me how far he can plan out over a year. He’ll sit down with Mike Dooley and they’ll go over the calendar for the entire year. They’ll sit in there for an entire day doing that, sometimes a day-and-a-half. That’s how long it takes to go through it all. Every now and then we’ll come back and add something to it. But his foresight and vision is so good in that regard.
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It’s really tough today on coaches and coaches with families, trying to spend some time not only with your players but your kids too. And he feels like that’s very important, so he makes the year’s plan in large part to help the coaches and everybody who works in this building know when they have time off and when they’re going to be able to do things with their families. Same thing with the players. They know when they’re going to be here and when they are going to be off. When a long-term schedule is up in the air, it can be very frustrating and I don’t think it makes the working environment around the office very good. That is one reason he’s been able to keep continuity in the staff.
You take some guys at other places, they might be part of a staff a year or two and then they move on. But the coaches that work here, they enjoy being here and their families enjoy being here because of what he generates as the head coach. Little things like family dinners on Wednesday evenings when everybody is in this building together. I really enjoy that, being somebody that’s been in the profession now going on 48 years. Seeing all the children in this building on Wednesday afternoons and at practice, and later at dinner, is very special.
One of the biggest pleasures I got during the national title run was in Glendale when we were taking the buses to the stadium to play Ohio State. I’m in a seat on the second bus, and I’m watching Tony Elliott and his son A.J. in a seat together. A.J. is asleep on his chest. Here Tony is, getting ready to go call a game with a trip to the national championship at stake, and he’s with his son. That’s important to Dabo. All that is part of his design, and it’s a big part of his success.
He’s big on personnel, and personnel meetings, and making sure everybody is on the same page when it comes to personnel. They talk extensively on that offensively, defensively and special teams, discussing the guys who are going to contribute.
Dabo is organized and believes in his community. He’s part of a lot of local organizations and doesn’t mind spending time with them and giving back. And it’s the same thing with his membership in the coaching profession. He thinks it’s important to be a part of conference meetings, national meetings.
When we won the national championship down in Tampa, the American Football Coaches Association convention was going on in Nashville from Sunday to Wednesday. We win the national title on a Monday night, and most coaches probably would have skipped the convention. Instead he went straight to Nashville after we got back to Clemson. He thought it was very important that he be sitting in those meetings to discuss legislation. He said, “How can you complain about the rules when you’re not going to be a part of making them?” All those things mean a lot to him. And the longer he’s in this job, the better he’s going to be at it because of the way he is.
Dabo is a lot like me in that he never throws anything away. That was one of the things that kind of drew me to him; my wife is getting on me right now because I’ve got stuff in our garage that I won’t get rid of. When I was at Mississippi State, I had a bunch of film that I got moved to DVD and now I’m in the process of putting those DVDs on files for my computer. He takes notes about everything, and he still has the notepads from the notes he took when he was playing at Alabama. He was always that way in meetings, always taking notes.
You can compare note-taking to musicians: They talk about how much music that’s still unpublished that Prince did, that Michael Jackson did. It’s the same thing with coaches who take a lot of notes. It’s really useful and important to go back and pick up some of those notes and wisdom and read them from time to time. And Dabo does the same thing. Most players don’t take notes the way Dabo did when he was at Alabama. Because it comes to them so easily. But that guy who’s in the Hall of Fame? He does that. Even though the Hall-of-Famers have a lot of ability, they do a lot of the little things too. The guys that play in the NFL 10 to 15 years, they did those small things that kept them there.
The mental part is the biggest part. That’s the only way Jerry Rice could play as long as he did, because he surely wasn’t as fast at the end of his career as the beginning. And I think that was the key with Dabo: He knew he was behind the 8-ball in some regard as a walk-on at Alabama, and he was going to have to make it up in another way. He was a student of the game, and he still is. That’s why he was and will always be such a note-taker.
Sometimes I tell Dabo that we need to scan these mountains of files he has in his office so they’re not at risk of being destroyed, so at least he has a backup. He’ll look at you and just laugh, because he’s such an optimistic person that he doesn’t think anything bad will ever happen. One time I said, “What if this building catches fire and all your stuff is gone?” He just smiles, because he doesn’t think anything bad is going to happen. You go in his office right now, he’ll tell you exactly where every file is.
When we moved from the West End Zone to the new operations facility, they had all these different ideas about how they wanted his office to be. I told them that’s not going to work. Because his new office might be larger, but he’s going to have everything in the same place where he’ll know exactly where to find it. And that’s exactly what he did: He came over here that first day and they had his office one way, and he completely turned it around. And I laughed. If he’s sitting at his desk and he turns to his left, he knows what files are on his left. Turns to his right, he knows where all the files are on the right. Same thing behind him. And I knew he wasn’t going to change anything going from his old office to his new one. It was going to be the exact same way.
When you’re the head coach and you’re pulled in so many different directions, sometimes it can be hard to decide what is important enough for your attention and what is not. It is harder to do that in the bigger cities, like Knoxville or Columbia or Columbus. When you’re in towns like that where you’ve got half a million people or more, you’d better really be focused and detailed because there is something coming at you all the time. Clemson is a little bit different. It’s a lot slower. He is involved in a lot. But if he’s doing something in Greenville, that’s 25 miles. So you tend to say you can’t do those things during the season unless it’s an open date. And you can focus a little bit more here. You have to have a strong will to be able to say yes, but the biggest thing is being able to say no.
How many coaches on Friday nights during the season have the will to say, “I’m going to my kid’s football game. And I want Brent Venables to go, and Joey Batson to go.” Forty-eight years I’ve been doing this, a lot of guys are afraid to do it. They don’t have the guts to do it. Because they wonder, “What happens if I lose my game on Saturday?” But you know what? A lot of them don’t try it. Tony Dungy won a certain way in the NFL being the way he is, and those other coaches in the league didn’t think that would work. And Dabo is kind of doing the same thing on this level with more focus on the family. We’re doing it this way because it can be done, and it’s the way we’re going to do it. Early on here when he was the head coach, he got a lot of criticism for a lot of things. But it’s working.
Regarding the comparison between Dabo and Nick Saban, when it comes to the team and what happens on the field there are a lot of similarities. Nick has probably been that way his whole life. A lot of people don’t want to let their guard down. I’m that way, because that’s the era that I came up in. But the thing you’ve got to be able to do is adjust. Every year I had to coach a group of guys, I had to adjust. I think Nick does that. I think Dabo does that, but Dabo is more of a fun-loving guy and he doesn’t mind showing it. Dabo has a philosophy, and Nick has a philosophy. But the methods are different. Both of them believe in running the football, but their methods are different. Dabo believes in having a strong defense. If he didn’t, Brent Venables wouldn’t be here.
Two years ago, Dabo made a conscious effort to focus on special teams because we weren’t very good at that in 2015. And then in 2016 it totally flipped, because he put a lot of emphasis on it. He evaluated everything after we lost the championship. It was a thorough evaluation of this program, and a lot of people wouldn’t agree with how he did it. He pointed out things on video that we didn’t do well. I guarantee you that some guys on the team wondered why he kept throwing that in their faces. We were so successful in 2015, and yet he kept pointing out what kept us from winning it all. But he made his point of showing how we could be better. So Dabo and Nick are very close in their processes and attention to detail, but their methods of doing it are different.
When I came back to Clemson to join Dabo’s staff, I had worked with three coaches who won national championships: Danny Ford, Gene Stallings and Phillip Fulmer. With Danny going into the College Football Hall of Fame this year, all three of those coaches I worked with are Hall of Fame coaches. And it’s so gratifying for the fourth national championship coach I’ve worked with, Dabo, to be someone I coached. It makes me so proud to be a part of that.
Every day I come in here to work, I feel good about coming to work. And it’s because of the attitude that he’s given this football program, this athletic department, this university. To be able to sit in staff meetings with him, and to see him direct a program that from top to bottom doesn’t take a back seat to anyone anymore, is so special. He’s consistently talking about doing it the right way. We don’t want any asterisks behind what we’ve done. And that’s the approach he takes every day.
Tigerillustrated.com thanks McCorvey for sharing his time and insight.
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