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HOOVER, Ala. -- Five days after Ken Hatfield and Clemson announced a separation, Tommy West was named the Tigers' 23rd head football coach on November 29, 1993.

West was a familiar name in Clemson, having served as an assistant coach under Danny Ford from 1982-89. And the fact that he spent much of the 80's as a Ford disciple immediately put him in good graces with the Clemson fan base.

But West inherited an 85-man roster that no longer resembled the top 10 program he had left in January of 1990. Though the longtime Tiger assistant was able to upgrade personnel, an 8-4 ledger in 1995 would be the program's high water mark under his watch. Three years later West would exit following a 3-8 campaign.

In late May of 2011 I sat down with West in Hoover, Ala. for an exclusive, one-on-one interview where the coach stepped back in time once more to place himself in the Clemson head coaching job to recall his five-year run as the program's front man.

West spoke candidly about the ups and downs of his program, keeping the ship afloat during a tumultuous 1996 campaign, recruiting battles, excessive attrition and the final days of his tenure where rumors began to swirl before the end of the 1998 season about an up-and-coming coach from Tulane who would soon end up in Clemson.

PUBLISHER's NOTE: When Tommy West prepared to ring in the New Year in late 1993, hours after receiving his first paycheck as Clemson's new head coach, he wasn't alone. That's because in December of 1993, Clemson's administration had three head football coaches on the payroll, as it was still making payments on contract settlements for Danny Ford and Ken Hatfield.

A decade earlier Clemson's football program had been recognized for pushing the envelope in facilities initiatives, so much so that Auburn had sent directors to Upstate, South Carolina to take a peek at the Tigers' box suites in Death Valley. By the time West took over in November of 1993, the program had fallen badly behind in football infrastructure with no real movement in ten years after Ford had begged the administration, notably foolhardy president Max Lennon, for additional football-related facilities.

By the time West took over as Clemson's head coach, in-state prospects the Tigers were used to landing under Ford were now leaving the Palmetto State with alarming regularity with Florida State, Tennessee and Penn State serving as the primary beneficiaries. Clemson also had been a strong, consistent recruiting presence in both Georgia and North Carolina and that too had abated.

Hatfield would sign just one top 20 recruiting class in four years. Four of West's five recruiting classes would rank inside of the top 20, yet the former Ford disciple would never finish a season ranked inside of the top 25, as massive academic casualties in recruiting, off-the-field problems, aging facilities and a lack of continuity on offense proved too much to overcome.

West would later meet with a young Tommy Bowden weeks after Bowden took over as head coach in 1998. Bowden wanted advice. The first thing West told him; "Stay on these people for facilities because you're way behind."

West's initial staff at Clemson was his best, but the coach backfilled with questionable hires, notably former UNC offensive coordinator Darryl Moody in 1996, a move West acknowledged in this interview was a mistake.

Nevertheless, in late November of 1993, a majority of the Clemson fan base had been quite eager to send Hatfield packing. Ford was not an option for the administration, so West - at the time - represented the perfect compromise, at least on the surface and despite just one year of head coaching experience at UTC-Chattanooga.

West would win his debut as Clemson's head coach in dramatic fashion in Atlanta, weeks later signing the 16th-best recruiting class in the country. Season ticket sales improved and sentiment held that the Tigers were on their way back.

This interview occurred at a hotel in Hoover, Ala. in May of 2011 not long after West had taken a job as the defensive coordinator at UAB. West, who now serves as an assistant coach at Middle Tennessee State under former Clemson assistant coach Rick Stockstill, acknowledges to this day that Clemson fired a better coach than it hired, a contention hard to dispute as Memphis had not gone to a bowl game since 1971 prior to West taking over as head coach in 2001. Before he left, Memphis had competed in five bowls in a six-year span, more than the program had participated in all-time.

This is Tommy West, in his own words.

This is his story.

PART II

Ard. You open the 1994 season ranked 24th in the AP Poll, you win over Furman in the opener, then you're hit pretty hard by N.C. State, 29-12, in week two., a team that would go on to finish 9-3.

You face Virginia, another team that would finish 9-3, and you drop a 9-6 decision, come back and shut out Maryland before dropping the next three, then you win the next three, including a win over #19 UNC before dropping a 33-7 decision to South Carolina in the season-finale.

As this season unfolded, what were you thinking about your program and how far you were from being where you needed to be?

West. "The North Carolina game, that was our biggest win of the year. You know, I'll tell you how I knew we were a bad football team. We led the nation that year in turnover ratio but still won five games. Well, that can't happen. But it did. We were a bad football team. We were a bad offensive team. I can't say we were bad on defense, because we weren't."

Ard. Your scoring defense was strong. You allowed just over 16 points a game, but offensively you averaged just 14.9 points per game and an average of just over 275 yards a contest.

West. "That's right. We were bad on offense and just couldn't score. We couldn't move the ball.

"We started out the year with Patrick Sapp as the quarterback and then Patrick was not going to be able to do what we wanted him to do, so then we made a change. We went to Louis Solomon and then it still wasn't happening. And then I moved Antwuan Wyatt to tailback and tried to make that work. Then I played Nealon Greene, a true freshman. I knew that none of the other guys would be our quarterback ... ever. So you might as well go ahead and play Nealon and take your lumps.

"I wasn't giving up on the season, but yet I was trying to prepare for the future and as a coach when you get into that spot, that's a tough situation. And things had changed in our conference. UVA had gotten really good at this point. North Carolina was coming back. And that was a great win for us up there. That was a huge win for us. We played really physical there. The South Carolina game, the second half, we fell apart. They were better than us at that time."

Ard. You have a bad year on the field, but it's been a full year for your staff on the road recruiting and it showed with your 1995 recruiting class, which was ranked 11th nationally. A ton of notables here: Anthony Simmons, Bennie Ziegler, Levar Graves, Antwan Edwards, Billy Luckie, Rashidi Brown, Shawn Cash, Rahim Abdullah, Davey Coggin, Michael Allen, Corey Hulsey, Damonte McKenzie, Adrian Dingle, O.J. Childress, Eric Bradford, Domarco Fox, Brandon Streeter and Chris Jones.

West. "Listening to that, those were good players. Rashidi Brown was the player of the year in New Jersey that year. He just didn't fit in and ended up leaving. We had way too much attrition in our classes for whatever reason. I remember Zeigler had a problem and I had to let him go. We had a lot of good players there that should have been with us for awhile."

Ard. Abdullah and Zeigler were at one time committed to Miami, but de-committed once Dennis Erickson left. What do you remember about landing them?

West. "Abdullah was going to flip and go to Florida. I remember when we were trying to recruit him, Ron Zook was relentless on him. He was an assistant coach at Florida at the time."

Ard. Edwards was headed to Florida State at one time, but he flipped for you at the eleventh hour. Ronnie Cottrel, to this day, still can't believe they lost Edwards.

West. "He was committed to them. We changed his mind and got him very late (around midnight before NSD)."

Ard. I want to talk about Anthony Simmons for a moment, because I think he's the best linebacker I've ever seen in a Clemson uniform. Highly rated (6.0 by The National Recruiting Advisor), but he was about 190 pounds at the time you signed him. What do you remember about going after him?

West. "I love Anthony Simmons. I absolutely love him. The first time I ever saw him play, he never missed a tackle. He never missed. If he got a chance to nail someone, he did. He knew how to tackle.

"I'll never forget this. I talked to a recruiting analyst and he asked me that summer before Anthony's senior year who I felt was the best prospect in the state. I said, 'The guy you've got rated 56th in the state now.' And he said, 'What?' I said, 'The guy that you have rated 56th now is the guy I think is the best football player in the state. It's Anthony Simmons at Spartanburg.' He said, 'But he's 185, 190 pounds.' I said, 'I'm just telling you.' He asked me where I thought he was going to play and I told him linebacker. He thought I was crazy. At the end of that season, Anthony was ranked #1 in the state.

"I get fired up talking about him. When we recruited him, I told him, I said, 'You're going to start. And I've never told a recruit in my life that he'll start, but I'm telling you, you're going to start the opening game for us. I want you to come in, be serious and be business-like.' And I've never seen a freshman act as mature as him. And then after three years of being great, an All-American, he comes in and says, 'Coach, I don't know if I want to leave.' I told him, 'Man, what more can you do? I can't tell you to stay. There's nothing more you can do. You can hurt yourself by staying.' Now, Trevor Pryce, I wanted him to stay.

"Anthony practiced like a professional everyday. He brought it everyday. People didn't realize how much fun it was to watch him."

Ard. You're in the spring of 1995 now. Your lines are better, particularly on offense. Nealon is back after getting some seasoning as a freshman. So you have to feel better about things at this point.

West. "I did. I knew that we were a more physical football team and that we could match up physically. We weren't just a bunch of babies and whiners. We had kind of been whiners the first year. They had accepted the challenge. We had a tough off-season, a tough spring.

"I'll never forget it. I'll never forget thinking ahead before we ever got into the off-season. We had just gotten beat by South Carolina and on the next day I just went over there and sat in the stadium by myself. It is a sick feeling when you don't win more than you lose at Clemson and you get beat in the last game. It's not a feeling you ever want to have. Now, we were fortunate to come back and beat them three out of the next four years.

"We went to work to improve our guys. We just had to be more physical and settle in on what we wanted to do. And you have to have a quarterback. And we felt like Nealon had improved."

Ard. The Carolina Panthers used Death Valley as their stadium the first season. Was your staff able to use this at all in recruiting; the fact that an NFL franchise opted to use your venue over others for their first season?

West. "No. But we wanted to. The rules wouldn't let us. Even when the 49ers played, Dwight Clark was with the front office at that time. We wanted our prospects to visit with the team, but we couldn't do it. We couldn't give our prospects a ticket to the NFL game. I don't think that helped us that much. It certainly tore our field up."

Ard. You start the 1995 season off with a 55-9 win over Western Carolina. You said after the game, "I'm not sure we could have scored 55 points on anybody last year." You face #1 Florida State next week, you lose 45-26, then come out to 3-3 after a 19-17 loss to Georgia at home, which you called a crushing defeat. Your team rebounds with a five-game winning streak, which includes a 38-17 blowout win over South Carolina in Columbia.

Clearly you had made progress here in year two. What were you thinking about your program at this point?

West. "You always feel good when you win, but sometimes you win and you know you're still not where you need to be. But I felt good about this team at the end of the year. We had become a really physical offensive team. We were playing good on defense and we were able to toss it around a little bit. We were a threat both ways and I felt like we were a good team. We weren't (a legitimate) top 25 but I felt we were pretty close. At the end of the year, we could have beaten a lot of teams in the top 25. Then we'd go on to have the most devastating blow of my career, which was the bowl game."

Ard. Clemson is ranked 23rd nationally at this point, you face a Syracuse team you're a slight favorite against in the Gator Bowl, a 9-3 team, but you fall 41-0. How did that happen?

West. "That was my fault. I screwed that up. What happened was - and I still beat myself up over this - I was still so excited about the toughness part and the progress we had made. I decided to take our team to Daytona Beach. We didn't beat Florida State, but we were second in the league. We're right there on them and we were at a position where we could compete with them. So I take my team to Daytona and we stay there for a while. We had done this in the 80's. And our kids were fine with it at that time. We practiced there twice a day. It's just what we had done under coach Ford all those years. Kids would go out at night and then come back and we'd have practices. But kids had changed now. I noticed that our kids weren't really going out at night. They were staying around the hotel.

"We eventually go up to Jacksonville, but again, we had spent two weeks in Florida. We had practice Christmas morning. The players wouldn't even talk to me. I said, 'Man, what's wrong with y'all.' They were like, 'Coach, it's Christmas morning.' I said, 'I know. I'm going to give you the rest of the day off.' Then I started getting the feeling that they did not want to be there. Two days before the game, they didn't want to be in Florida at all. I knew it.

"I had a staff meeting and I told our coaches, 'Guys, we've got a huge problem. These kids are tired. We've practiced too much. We've been down here too much. They don't want to be here. I've screwed this thing up. All they want to do is go home. They want to get this game over, get the hell out of here, get away from football and go home.'

"I knew I had really messed this up. Man, we went and played like we wanted to hurry up and get home. And I knew it before the game. And I had heard all the rumors that they had been out excessively partying all week and that just wasn't true. What happened was, mentally, they weren't there. And this was on top of us running into Marvin Harrison and Donovan McNabb, a really good football team who had some key players who were great."

Ard. Your team suffers a tremendous defeat at the hands of Syracuse in the bowl game, so what would go on to be a tumultuous year begins on shaky ground. Not long after you get home, Clemson loses its legendary coach, Frank Howard. What do you remember about his passing?

West. "If you're a Clemson guy then you have a lot of respect for coach Howard. I appreciated the opportunities I had to be around him. And it was a loss. Coach Howard was Clemson."

Ard. You sign another top 20 recruiting class the following week. The notables: Idris Price, T.T. Toliver, Terry Witherspoon, Mal Lawyer, Jason Gamble, Ray Redziniak, Justin Watts, Brian Wofford, Rod Joseph, Lorenzo Bromell, Gary Childress, Rod Gardner, Warren Lott, Sam Zanders and Jason Holloman.

West. "More attrition. More attrition. The first two names, man those were great players. Great prospects. I can look back now and see it. That's more than I remember. We had way too much attrition in our classes. Too many great players never got to Clemson."

Ard. I'm fast-forwarding a bit here, but there was a story about Idris Price - rated a 6.0 by The National Recruiting Advisor and the No. 4 linebacker recruit in the country - going with you to the North Carolina game for the season opener and he's literally pulled off the bus by admissions and denied eligibility.

West. "That was a really, really bad deal. A bad deal. Our administration decided that they weren't going to let him play. I remember that we went so far into that, that we were going to let him take a lie detector test.

"This was more us (Clemson than the NCAA). They questioned the test score. And he was a heck of a linebacker. We're getting ready to go to Chapel Hill and I remember that's a point where we had already gone through a lot of distractions from within. It's hard enough to beat Florida State. You can't be fighting battles from within your own university. And I was fighting for him."

Ard. One of your assistant coaches told me one time, "They want us to be Princeton here six days a week and then be Clemson on Saturdays."

Was that the way it was from your vantage point?

West. "Part of that perception is because of the conference, maybe not now but at that time. I always used to tell people that they never realized how good an academic school Clemson is. I always felt like Clemson had a chip on its shoulder about some things, because it was selective in admissions but perhaps wasn't as known academically as some of the other universities in the conference, despite Clemson being a great academic institution.

"At this point in time in the 1990s I thought our administration decided that test scores were more important than Clemson. And I loved Clemson because Clemson was great granddaddy, son, daughter and just everybody went there. It was a family place. It was a college for people of the state of South Carolina. But I saw us changing. So now if a kid from Cheraw, South Carolina wants to go to Clemson and has the score and his whole family has gone to Clemson but there is a better test score in New Jersey, then all of a sudden we started taking other people. And that had nothing to do with football, but I did see Clemson changing at that time for what I felt was for the worse."

Ard. I would be remiss if I didn't bring this up. Here in 1996 there were two franchise (6.1) or five-star defensive ends in the state you were after, Courtney Brown, who ultimately chose Penn State and Shaun Ellis from Westside in Anderson, who went to Tennessee. Ellis later stated publicly in an interview with The State newspaper that he wanted to go to Clemson, his mother had even gotten off work on National Signing Day to rush to his presser with his Clemson LOI, though he said at the time of the presser he just felt obligated to go, partly because of his coach (Ted Luckadoo) and the message he was getting from Luckadoo consistently about Tennessee and the coach's perception that Tennessee had recruited him harder and longer.

West. "That got into a political thing. I mean there was no question that Shaun wanted to go to Clemson. He had dreamed of running down the hill and playing at Clemson. That was a thing where his coach felt like it would be better for him to go somewhere else. And I didn't think it was his coach's decision. The coach had been very influential with him. In the end, I think he persuaded Shaun. And Tennessee is a fine place, but I really felt like Shaun should have been at Clemson. And of all the kids we signed at Clemson I never worried about who we didn't get but that was one we should have signed. I thought it was wrong. Shaun Ellis should have been playing at Clemson."

Ard. Looking back, would you have done anything differently in recruiting Ellis?

West. "I don't know what else we could have done. I'll never forget that they (South Carolina's staff) tried to make a big deal when Brad Scott came to the school and talked to the principals. You only get one off-campus visit. I didn't go to his school, because I wanted to be the first coach in his home so I went to his home that December. December 1 I was the first coach in his home. Because I wanted him to know that he was the most important guy to us. I wasn't there - because of the one visit - in January and they were making a big deal of it. Well don't tell me that they were doing a better job of recruiting him. No they're not. They're not. However, it was a long way from December 1 to signing day. So that's when things started changing a little bit."

Ard. Ellis didn't go with you, but you had another big-time recruit in the fold. You had a transfer from Michigan this off-season, Trevor Pryce, who out of high school also had been rated a 6.1 and was billed as the No. 1 linebacker prospect in the country. When you got him he was 6-5, 275 and had turned in some 4.7/40 times.

West. "As soon as I heard he was available, I went to Rick Stockstill. Because Rick had recruited him (under Ken Hatfield) several years earlier and Trevor had visited Clemson before signing with Michigan. We went to work once we found out that he was definitely transferring. We recruited him really hard."

Ard. When you got him into your spring drills, what was your initial impression?

West. (Smiling) "I thought he could be great. He just had ability. He had more ability than any defensive lineman I had seen there in a while. This guy could fly. He was only 215 pounds coming out of high school, but had won some titles in the state track meet."

Ard. Let's get a little deeper into 1996 now, because you've now lost Christensen to the NFL and you opt to bring in North Carolina's Darryl Moody as your offensive coordinator.

West. "No hard feelings towards Darryl Moody, but I made a mistake here. Hindsight is 20/20. Sometimes the grass looks greener elsewhere. Why I didn't give it to Rick Stockstill at that time, I don't know. And Rick is a dear friend of mine and I've told him that I messed that thing up. Rick knew what we wanted to get accomplished. He knew how we had gone about it. And we had taken a really, really bad offensive team and made it a pretty good offensive team, maybe as good of an offensive team since the Fullers and the Bostics. Because we were never great on offense in the 80's.

"At that time I felt like if we could improve the play action game, that would help us. Darryl didn't understand where we had come from. I should have just promoted Rick. So this was the second biggest mistake I made there. The bowl game (Gator Bowl - Syracuse/preparation) was the first."