One-on-one with Thad Turnipseed
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****** By request, Tigerillustrated.com is re-releasing our LENGTHY, one-on-one interview with Clemson's Thad Turnipseed, originally released in August of 2016.
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CLEMSON –- Thad Turnipseed has built Clemson’s recruiting room into a monster from scratch, yet he hadn’t previously spent his professional life learning the art of recruiting.
He played a major role in turning the Tigers’ communications apparatus from an afterthought into a model for the rest of the country, yet he’ll tell you himself he couldn’t produce a graphic or a video to save his life.
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He spent 20 years building things, but none of them as cutting-edge and visionary and all-encompassing as the sprawling, breathtaking operations facility that will be the first of its kind when it opens in January.
Turnipseed is an idea man who loves to build things – physical things and concepts. He says the source of those ideas is … daydreaming.
“I’m a professional daydreamer,” Turnipseed said with a smile.
A wandering mind is typically not regarded as a good thing, but in the last two decades one of the biggest discoveries of neuroscience revealed the creative benefits of daydreaming.
In the 2014 book The Organized Mind, Daniel Levitin writes: “This distinctive and special brain state is marked by the flow of connections among disparate ideas and thoughts, and a relative lack of barriers between senses and concepts. It also can lead to great creativity and solutions to problems that seemed unsolvable.”
To learn more about a person and a wandering mind that has been so critical to Clemson’s rise since Dabo Swinney hired him from Alabama in 2013, Tigerillustrated.com sat down with Turnipseed this week for an extended period.
Here, in Turnipseed’s own words, are reflections from the mind of Clemson’s daydream believer:
When I came to campus for the first time in 2013, there was a job named Director of High School Relations. That was the job that was open. Dabo had been talking to me a few months before about wanting me to possibly come here one day and join the football office. I told him I’d be interested in that. So I come here for the visit, and on an interview for the job I had no intention of taking, I get here at 7 in the morning and I ask him, “What do I do?” I kept asking him, because I had no idea. I asked him three or four times throughout the day. So at 2 o’clock, I had to leave to go pick up Nick Saban at the airport in Atlanta, and Dabo says: “Thad, I don’t care what you do. I don’t care if you don’t do anything for a year. Just come here, find out where we need to be better, make us better at that and then go to the next thing.” That showed real wisdom on his part.
So the first thing I knew we needed was the recruiting department, the structure to help Jeff Scott who was then the recruiting coordinator. Jeff and the assistants were doing everything we do now; we’re just doing it more efficiently and we give them a lot more support. We didn’t have a social media department at that time. So I started the @ClemsonFB Twitter feed with one student and me. I didn’t have a Twitter account or a Facebook account when I came here. I couldn’t make a movie or a graphic if you put a gun to my head. But I know good when I see good. So that first whole year-and-a-half, it was me and students doing all the @ClemsonFB with graphics and videos. And that’s really how Jonathan Gantt was brought in as Director of New Media. Give Dan Radakovich the credit on that; he knew the vision, that that’s what other departments were going to and investing in social media. I had taken it as far as I could take it. But at least it was a good start.
At the time I would read the message boards on Tigerillustrated.com, and the people on there were saying I’m some kind of hero and I’m laughing and thinking, “If they just knew how much of a shoestring we’re on.” Everybody here was a student, and most of them were working for free. But something was better than nothing at that point. So getting that room organized was important.
This wasn’t what I was doing at Alabama. I was the person who was managing the airplanes for the coaches. I was the connection person at Alabama. It was kind of like I was part-IPTAY; I did our plane donor program and our car dealerships – I just knew people, and that was my specialty.
My first eight years at Alabama, I built all their facilities. And I was Nick Saban’s football and external affairs guy. My title was Special AD for Projects, which basically meant keep Nick happy. But I was not on the football staff. If Nick got fired, I still had a job. I was sort of in no-man’s land, because the administration side thought I was on the football side and the football side thought I was on the administrative side. So I was sort of like a man without a home for those last five years.
So it’s a lot different here as far as the responsibilities. Here, we are doing the recruiting department and social media. We hired Jordan Sorrells a year-and-a-half later, and he is better than I will ever be. My role here now is, I’m still the Director of Recruiting. We have two divisions: Jordan and the War Room division, that arranges the coaches’ travel and manages the recruiting board, and the communications division that does the videos and graphics and the creative part.
And we don’t cheat. Probably the No. 1 broken rule in college football is, no one in the department can evaluate recruits but the nine assistant coaches, the head coaches and the four graduate assistants. Most of these other schools, they have this whole department with three or four people – former pro coaches, college coaches – and all they do is watch film. But it’s clearly stated in the rules that you can’t do that. Dabo tells us we’re not going in the gray area, and we don’t break that rule. I tell people my department couldn’t care less who we recruit. That’s the coaches’ job. That’s what Dabo says: “It’s on the coach.” So none of us in the recruiting department should – and we don’t – have any input on who we put on that board.
Where we’re really good is in running the recruiting machine: the graphics, the touches, while they’re here how they’re treated. It’s amazing how much Jeff Scott had to do before on game days when recruits would visit. He would go throw warm-up passes to Sammy Watkins, run upstairs and do his recruiting speech, run back down and do a little bit more warm-ups, come back up, get the recruits in the seating section, grab some recruits and take them up to the rock for the run-through. Well now he doesn’t have to do have any of that. We have all that in place. So before the game, our department runs that whole pre-game recruiting deal. We run all the unofficial visits, we run all the official visits. All the events that deal with recruiting, our recruiting machine runs. So we hired Jordan before the first Oklahoma bowl game, and then by this past year a lot of my time was devoted to the football operations facility. Probably 60 percent of my time has been spent on the building.
We have a recruiting meeting every Tuesday. I tell everybody: We’re a democracy, but I get veto power. Just like Dabo with his veto power. I used that veto a lot early on, but now we’re all on the same page. Jonathan Gantt’s group is on the same page – and I can’t say enough great things about Jonathan. The same way Jordan took this over, Jonathan came in and took that over. And both of them have made us way better than I could ever get us. I can’t stress this enough: I’m an idea guy who likes to build things, but Jordan and Jonathan took it over and made this whole thing what it is today. We are where we are today because of a lot of people who are smarter than I am, most notably those two.
So I’ve been able to focus a lot of my time on the ops facility. We had full authority on laying it out, what should be in it, controlling the budget. Dan Radakovich and deputy AD Graham Neff deserve a lot of credit, because they didn’t have to let us have that much leeway. They hired a great guy in Joe Simon to do a lot of the facilities stuff, and he handles all the paperwork and change orders and related parts of that. He has just as much input as I have in the project. So it’s been a dream job for me, because I’m just over there like a kid in a candy store. That’s been my role this year, coming up with ideas and make sure they fit our budget.
Another part of my role last year was helping Jeff Davis, who I think is the most valuable person outside of a coach in this building. If you rank the importance of coaches behind our coordinators, I think Jeff Davis is key to the way this culture works here. Before we had him in charge of the personal growth of the players, the jobs program, the life skills program. But the problem was, every time you go by Jeff Davis’ office – every day, 10 to 12 hours a day – there’s a player there talking about life. And that’s what he’s great at.
You can’t work 10 to 12 hours a day talking to players one-on-one and still be the best in your jobs program or the life skills program. So I wanted to help him champion the importance of the Paw Journey, which will be the most important part of this new building because that’s the part that will help these football players become men. That was my goal, to help him organize that and get it on paper. He hired two people just recently, and now when we move in there in January we’ll instantly be the best leadership/jobs/career development center in the country.
So that was the goal last year, to get the building built. This year, my goal is to brand the Paw Journey. I want people to understand the Paw Journey nationwide, working with the athletic department to, get us all on the same message as far as what we’re trying to convey. Because we need to be at the forefront of what is good in college football. We’ve got the finest person, the best coach in college football who just so happens to be one of the finest people in college football. That’s what makes us special.
And then you get Clemson people to truly believe in that. Not all places believe in that. Most people just want to win, and they don’t care how you win. Clemson people want to do it right. And right is graduating players, caring for the players, and winning football games. Unfortunately, at most places it’s just winning football games at all costs. We’ve got to win, and we are winning, and we’re going to continue to win. But we’re doing it different. And that’s the secret sauce.
Speaking of that secret sauce, sometimes I hear people complain that we’re talking too much about what we do and we’re giving away our secrets. Well, we could give the blueprint to anybody. But until you have the right people in place, the blueprint is not going to work. It starts with the head guy. There are not many Dabo Swinneys out there.
Another thing this year I’ll be doing is getting the bottom floor of the West End Zone remodeled a little bit for after we move into the new facility. Game days will be a little different when we’re over there.
So to sum it all up, the core of my job will always be recruiting. But I always try to take something on the side to make us better whether it’s recruiting, social media, the building, the Paw Journey, whatever it might be.
I say this all the time, and the people who know me will laugh when they read this phrase: You’re truly great when everybody knows the plan and no one cares who gets the credit. That sounds simple, but that is so hard to do. I’ve talked about how great Jordan and Jonathan are, and I empowered them. The reason it works is empowerment. Dabo empowered me, and I have 100-percent confidence in his belief in me. I know he’s not going to fire me tomorrow. Therefore, I give Jordan as much power as I can possibly give him in that room and he has confidence in my belief in him. Jonathan works in the athletics department, but I didn’t have to bridge that gap between the AD and the football office. It was a process with Joe Galbraith and Jonathan and me. I wanted those people to be involved. I knew they were better at me on these things. But at the same time, I wanted the central core of Dabo’s message never to be lost. So we had to protect that culture. And we bring these guys into our culture a little bit at a time, and they get it.
At this point, there’s very little I have to approve. Other than our Tuesday meeting where I get my little say-so, I get to be a daydreamer. I get to always dream of how to be better. And it’s because the head man has the leadership ability to empower me, and in turn I get the leadership ability to empower others. I don’t want the credit for social media. I don’t want the credit for the best War Room department. I want Clemson to have that credit. And I think we’re there. I think we’re to the point where everybody wants the same goal. And when you are the best, the right people always rise. It’s just getting there.
Most of the time, you have people blocking that. I can easily sit in my chair and not let Jonathan Gantt be known as the best social media person in the country. I could easily hold Jordan back in that War Room and let no one know who he is. First of all, that’s not the right thing to do. Second, they wouldn’t feel empowered to want to be the best.
It’s very unique how we got to where we are – and very ironic, given that Dabo’s not on Twitter and I’m not very tech-savvy myself. Dabo deserves so much credit, because he didn’t even know what he wanted when he brought me in. His management style allowed me to daydream.
Coming tomorrow: We will release part 2 of our one-on-one with Turnipseed.
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