Garrett Riley connection comes full circle
CLEMSON -- J.C. Harper has been out of college football sight since 2014, when he was fired at Stephen F. Austin after seven seasons leading the program.
He and his family ended up in Lake Charles, La., because that's where his wife is from. Success in the real-estate market allowed him to make a clean break with football and settle into family life that included driving his children to school every day.
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"My son Michael was around when I was coaching; I think he was 6 or 7," Harper said. "So he knows that side of it, but my younger daughter doesn't. I wanted Michael to know that there's other things you can do to make money and raise a family, and it doesn't necessarily have to be coaching. Unless it's in your blood. I didn't know anything else when I was growing up. My dad was a coach, and my mom was a teacher, and that was it."
Harper, now 57, is the son of one of the key figures of the glory days under Danny Ford. Tom Harper was the rugged and relentless defensive line coach during the decade when the Tigers rose to sustained prominence for the first time.
Tom died of a heart attack in 1989 at age 56, and J.C. went on to a coaching career that included stints under Mack Brown at North Carolina and Lou Holtz at Notre Dame.
J.C. has been out of sight, but he returned to the front of mind amid the news that Dabo Swinney hired Garrett Riley from TCU to recharge Clemson's offense.
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When he took over the head job at Stephen F. Austin in 2007, Harper knew exactly how he wanted to model his program. The pillars were going to be unforgiving defense, an efficient offense that relied on running the ball, and opportunistic special-teams play.
Basically everything he learned at Clemson under his father and Ford as a player from 1984 to 1988.
"When I interviewed for the job, I basically sold the president and the AD on the way we won at Clemson. Because that's all I knew."
The administration bought in, but the players didn't. Before long, players were jumping ship during an 0-11 season and Harper found himself trying to teach his backup quarterback how to play cornerback on the bus ride to a game because he was so low on corners.
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"I knew we had problems, and I had to fix them," he said. "I didn't even know if they were going to keep me as head coach. What we were doing wasn't going to work."
In searching for a system and an identity that would galvanize his players, Harper took particular notice of the 7-on-7 phenomenon that had already become a major offseason fixture in Texas.
His logic: If high school kids are spending their summers devoted to such a format, then it must be something they enjoy.
And the father of all that throwing and catching was Mike Leach, in Lubbock and coaching Texas Tech at the time. Leach's defensive coordinator was Ruffin McNeill, who was a graduate assistant at Clemson under Tom Harper for two seasons in the 1980s.
JC said his father was "ruthless" with everyone including his children. It wasn't until J.C. became a front-line player at Clemson that JC and his father developed a close bond.
"But before that, Ruffin was kind of the buffer between me and my dad," J.C. said. "He would always kind of tell me what I needed to do, or what I needed to say to help me out with my dad. So Ruffin and I became really good friends, and he's a great man."
When J.C. reached out to McNeill about the Air Raid, McNeill told him he needed to do it. J.C. asked for some recommendations about who might be the best guy to implement the offense at Stephen F. Austin, and McNeill consulted with Leach and Red Raiders assistant Dana Holgorsen before giving J.C. three names that included Shannon Dawson of Division III Millsaps in Mississippi.
After Dawson came aboard the Lumberjacks won four games in Harper's second year, but by 2009 they won the Southland Conference title. In 2009 and 2010 they combined for a 19-6 record overall and a 12-2 record in the conference.
Harper believes the same simplicity that facilitated that turnaround will help Clemson moving forward.
"It's really hard for coaches to be simple," Harper said. "Coaches get bored, so they want to tinker. And they want to add this or add that, or do this. And then they want to blame the players when it doesn't work.
"When I think about the Mike Leach system and what we did, it was like going to school. Shannon brought it down to the lowest common denominator so that it was very easy to teach, and easy for players to understand."
In that 2010 season, Garrett Riley was a member of the Stephen F. Austin team after transferring from Texas Tech. Riley played sparingly that year behind starter Jeremy Moses, but Harper said Riley was a key figure in helping put together the game plan each week as the Lumberjacks repeated as conference champions.
Here's how Garrett landed at Stephen F. Austin: Leach was fired at Texas Tech after claims of abuse from receiver Adam James, son of ESPN football analyst Craig James.
McNeill left for the head-coaching job at East Carolina, and Lincoln Riley followed him.
"Lincoln reached out to Shannon Dawson and said Garrett wanted to find a place that had a similar offense to what they had been doing at Texas Tech," Harper said. "And we were exact; it wasn't just similar. Everything we did -- the verbiage, everything -- was exactly the same as they did it at Texas Tech. And it was great to have Garrett come in after being in that system. Many times, Garrett and Shannon would visit and game plan. It was perfect. It was a great situation for Garrett, and for us."
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Now Swinney and Clemson pulled Harper's old quarterback away from TCU, and it seems like a great situation for Garrett and Harper's alma mater.
So it's all come full circle in a way, and Harper is out of sight as he enjoys his post-coaching life in Louisiana.
But not out of mind.
"Garrett and I don't really have any reason to visit or do anything," Harper said. "Once football is over you find another network or another group. So I've kind of moved on and I do my own thing.
"But I feel like Garrett and I are always connected, and this has connected us more in a way."
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