Getting to Us

by Seth Davis

  As Swinney was getting set to begin his redshirt freshman season at Alabama, Carol was still having a tough time making ends meet. Dabo suggested that she should just move into his apartment in Tuscaloosa. Space was tight, so they shared not just a bedroom—they shared a queen-sized bed. They stuck a broomstick in the closet so they would have some place to hang their clothes.

  It may seem like those were tough times, but Carol looks back and calls them some of the best days of her life. “We didn’t have anything, but we were making it,” she says. “We could go to sleep at night and we didn’t have to worry.” Swinney’s roommates called her Mama Swinney, and from time to time the other players would come by to ask her to sew a button or wash some clothes or serve up her homemade brownies. Every Sunday, she’d cook a huge chicken-and-dumplings dinner. The leftovers lasted for days.

  With his girlfriend enrolled in school and his mother living as his roommate, Swinney dove into his life as a college student and walk-on wide receiver. He did not appear in any games during his redshirt freshman season, but he endeared himself to the coaching staff, particularly Tommy Bowden, the wide receivers coach. However, he was blindsided at the end of the season when Alabama’s head coach, Bill Curry, was dismissed along with his entire staff. With the new coach, Gene Stallings, at the helm, Swinney did not set foot on the field during the 1990 spring game. He was profoundly discouraged.

  Still, Dabo being Dabo, he persisted, working hard throughout the summer and fall in hopes someone would notice. He felt invisible until one day in October, when the new receivers coach, Woody McCorvey, called him over during practice. To that point, Swinney had barely heard McCorvey say his name, but the coach was watching more closely than he realized. “I was impressed with the way he went about his business. He was always trying to do things correctly,” McCorvey says. “You couldn’t help but notice him.” On this day, McCorvey was fed up with his varsity receivers. He told Swinney that if he had a good practice, he would suit up that Saturday at Ole Miss.

  Swinney sprinted back to the locker room and put on a white jersey. He paused for a few moments of prayer. Then he charged onto the field and practiced his tail off. He was rewarded with a coveted spot on the travel roster. After the roster was posted, Swinney took down the sheet of paper and kept it as a souvenir. Today it hangs in a frame in the basement of his house in Clemson.

  Once he got that chance to compete, Swinney never let up. Eventually, Stallings rewarded him with a scholarship. Swinney wasn’t all that big or quick, but Stallings’s teams hardly ever threw the ball anyway. His primary responsibility was to serve as a blocker. That was something he knew he could do.

  After playing in four games and catching one pass as a redshirt sophomore, Swinney played in nine games and caught two balls as a junior. As a senior, he caught a total of four passes for 48 yards. When Alabama took the field on January 1, 1993, to play for the national championship in the Sugar Bowl against Miami, Swinney was a starting wide receiver. The Tide’s quarterback, Jay Barker, threw just 13 passes in the game (Swinney had no catches), and the Tide won in a rout, 34–13. From crawl-on to walk-on to national champ—that’s what Dabo Swinney did.

  He was named to the SEC’s all-academic team, but he gained his most important knowledge on the field. “I tell people I have a ton of education, but the education I got between those lines, I can’t put a price on that,” he says. “The things I learned about myself, the challenges, the sacrifices, the team aspect, the work ethic I had to bring every day was just powerful in shaping me into who I am today, not just to coach my players but be a dad to my three boys. It was an amazing experience.”

  By that time, Swinney had given up on the idea of becoming a doctor, mostly because he did not want to endure a long residency. So he switched his major to commerce and business administration and aspired to run a hospital someday. After graduation, he started working as an intern for a health care company in Birmingham and had accepted a full-time position for the fall. Later that summer, however, he got a call from Stallings, who said he wanted to hire Dabo as a graduate assistant coach. To that point, Swinney had never considered a career in coaching, but he liked the idea of having his education paid for while he pursued an MBA. Besides, when Gene Stallings tells an Alabama boy to do something, it’s hard to say no. So Swinney accepted the offer, moved back to Tuscaloosa, and showed up for practice.

  Immediately, it felt like home.

  * * *

  • • •

  Unfortunately, things were not going nearly as well for his father. Ervil had remarried and found a business partner to open a hardware store with him in Alabaster. He and his new wife lived in a trailer behind the store. He scaled back his drinking to a few days a week, but when he drank, he still got drunk. Chain-smoked, too. Ervil was estranged from Carol, Tripp was nowhere to be found, and while Tracy had moved back to Pelham to join the police force, he had basically washed his hands of his dad. Dabo was the only one who stayed in touch, encouraging Ervil to make different choices. It was to little avail.

  Carol also remarried shortly after Dabo’s graduation from Alabama. Her new husband, Larry McIntosh, worked for State Farm insurance in Birmingham. Meanwhile, Dabo poured himself into coaching. He was a natural. All those years of squeezing out every drop of his own potential translated beautifully into working with young men who were far more gifted than he ever was. He was inexhaustible when it came to accumulating information, filling up countless notebooks with ideas, diagrams, and ruminations on all the things the Alabama coaches were doing, good and bad. He never threw a single notebook away.

  When his two years in graduate school were up, Swinney was given a full-time job on the staff, first as tight ends coach and later as wide receivers coach. And then, just like that, he was out of work. In 2000, head coach Mike DuBose, who had succeeded Stallings three years before, was fired. His whole staff was swept out the door with him. Swinney hardly had time to contemplate his next move before he got an offer from a most surprising source—Rich Wingo, the former strength coach at Alabama who had tortured him so badly during walk-on tryouts. Swinney hadn’t heard from Wingo in more than ten years. Turns out Wingo was now president of a large company based in Birmingham called AIG Baker Real Estate, and he wanted to offer Swinney a job. Swinney was skeptical, but he was unemployed and the job came with an $80,000 salary. He accepted the offer. A few days later, he was flying to Las Vegas to help negotiate leases on a local shopping center.

  Swinney loved that job. He enjoyed reading through demographic reports and sales figures, absorbing and processing the information in order to discern opportunities. He was savvy when it came to cutting deals. He was also making good money and living a normal life, the kind where a man leaves the house at a decent hour and comes back in time for dinner. Still, it wasn’t football, so when his old receivers coach, Tommy Bowden, who had taken the head coaching job at Clemson four years before, called in 2003 and asked if he wanted to be his wide receivers coach, Swinney jumped at the chance—even though Kathleen was pregnant with their third child, they were two weeks away from moving into a new house, and everyone knew Bowden was on very thin ice.

  Swinney’s brief tenure in the business world is barely a footnote on his curriculum vitae, but the knowledge he gained during those two years was invaluable. It provided him with an understanding of business culture, which he has applied to his work in coaching. It gave him the chance to learn how a large company structures itself and operates, which is no small benefit considering that a major college football coach is basically the CEO of a multimillion-dollar enterprise. From a personal standpoint, it instilled in him confidence that he could do something else outside of football, which reduced his worry. And when he returned to coaching, he had a much deeper appreciation of how lucky he was to do what he loved, where he could use his empathy to have an impact on young men. He couldn’t play anymore, but he sure could talk, and he believed he had some
thing to say.

  * * *

  • • •

  Dabo kept the new house and invited Ervil and his new wife to move into it. Then he packed up his two boys and his pregnant wife and headed for Clemson.

  Swinney was an able receivers coach, but his true value was as a recruiter. The task required all the things he was good at—an eye for talent, a willingness to work hard, charm, persistence, and, most of all, a hardwired habit of thinking beyond his circumstances. “I’ve always considered myself an overbeliever,” he says.

  He refused to cede the fertile grounds of the South to all those SEC schools (as well as the ACC’s Florida State) who were accustomed to plucking the best players like so much low-hanging fruit. Swinney immediately went after the best of the best, guys like C. J. Spiller, a running back from Florida who was a consensus top 10 recruit nationally. Swinney established an early rapport with Spiller, pursuing him even when many people, including folks at Clemson, assured him he was wasting his time. When Spiller promised Swinney that he would visit Clemson, Swinney pulled out his business card and made Spiller sign a “contract” to ensure that he would follow through. Spiller canceled his visit to Alabama to go see Clemson. He eventually became a consensus All-American there as a senior and was the ninth pick in the 2010 NFL draft.

  It wasn’t long before Swinney started gaining a national reputation. In 2006, Rivals.com, a prominent recruiting website, tapped him as the nation’s No. 5 recruiter. The following January, he met with Nick Saban, the recently hired coach at Alabama, who wanted him to come on board as a well-compensated assistant. Swinney was tempted, but considering it was just a few weeks before national signing day for recruits, he didn’t feel right ditching kids he had persuaded to come to Clemson, not to mention abandoning Bowden and the school itself, which had given him the opportunity.

  Despite those efforts, Clemson continued to languish, leading Bowden to resign halfway through the 2008 season. All of Bowden’s assistants were left on the payroll, but it was understood that a new coach would be hired once the season was over. In the meantime, the program needed an interim head coach. The staff included two coordinators with previous head coaching experience, but largely based on his recruiting prowess, and partly based on Bowden’s recommendation, Swinney got the job. He was all of thirty-three years old.

  That decision was widely derided as typifying Clemson’s tendency to think small. And in many ways, it was. Swinney didn’t care. One of his first acts as head coach was to fire the team’s offensive coordinator and take over the offense himself. He also instituted a tradition he called the “Tiger Walk,” which involved the entire team walking through the stadium parking lot two hours before kickoff. With Swinney providing a badly needed injection of energy, the Tigers won four of their last six games, including a 31–14 win over rival South Carolina in the season finale. That made Clemson eligible for a bowl game, and it persuaded the administration to give Swinney the job permanently. He had momentum, he showed promise, and he came cheap, accepting an annual salary of $800,000, a paltry sum for an ACC head coach.

  Instead of trying to get more money for himself, Swinney put on his businessman’s hat and lobbied his board of directors to invest in underfunded areas. He procured higher salaries for assistants as well as commitments to upgrade the woebegone facilities. He also proved unafraid to make big, risky changes. When his second full season ended in a disappointing 6–7 record, he had to concede that his offense was outdated. So he persuaded the school to shell out $1.3 million per season to hire Chad Morris as his offensive coordinator, even though Morris, a longtime high school football coach, had spent just one season in college as the offensive coordinator at Tulsa. Swinney turned the offense over to Morris, who rewarded that faith by helping Clemson to its first 11-win season in thirty-one years. The 2012 season ended with a major breakthrough victory over No. 8 LSU in the Chick-fil-A Bowl.

  The blessings of success came with the burdens of expectations. During the three-year period from 2011 to 2014, Clemson lost a total of six games, but every time Swinney’s teams were on the verge of greatness, they would suffer a crushing loss. In 2013 the Tigers finished the season by making the Orange Bowl for the first time in twenty years, only to be embarrassed by West Virginia, 70–33. Their national title hopes the following year were derailed in a humiliating 51–14 loss to Florida State. That led to the unfortunate birth of the term “Clemsoning,” which the website Urban Dictionary defined as “the act of failing miserably on a grand athletic stage, or when the stakes are high.” When the Tigers lost to Florida State even though the Seminoles’ star quarterback, Jameis Winston, was sitting out because of a one-game suspension, the Washington Post published an online story under the cruel headline “Against Florida State, Clemson’s ‘Clemsoning’ Was the Most ‘Clemsoning’ Clemson Ever Clemsoned.”

  Swinney persisted, hauling in five consecutive top 20 recruiting classes, and two that were ranked in the top 10. After the Orange Bowl debacle, he fired his defensive coordinator, Kevin Steele, and replaced him with Brent Venables, whom he plucked from Oklahoma. Swinney’s staff payroll grew from $287,118 in Bowden’s final season to $1.47 million in 2014. It was a significant capital investment, but one that Swinney knew would produce returns. “Those great businesses out there, those great programs, they don’t plateau,” he said. “How do you do that? Well, you have to constantly reinvent, reinvest, reset, learn, grow, change.”

  There have been countless ways, large and small, that Swinney has strived to instill a winning culture. The Tiger Walk was a small but telling early example that he wanted everything done the exact right way. He is a meticulous planner who tells the same stories, uses the same phrases, and harps on the same messages, even if his guys have heard it all a thousand times. “That’s something I learned from Coach Stallings,” he says. “I spent seven years with him, and every year I’d be like, ‘Here comes the Mama Don’t Fret story. Here comes the Ben Hogan story.’ That’s how he protected his culture. When you say it enough so your players can repeat it, that’s when you know they’re getting it.”

  At the same time, there are few coaches who are Swinney’s equal when it comes to keeping things fresh and fun. He has a fetish for acronyms, like ALL IN (Attitude, Leadership, Legacy, Improvement, New Beginnings), EARN (Effect, Accountability, doing what’s Right, Nourishing the concept of team and family), BEST (Belief, Effort, Sense of urgency, and Toughness), and PAW (Passionate About Winning). Before the 2014 game against South Carolina, he heard the Michael Jackson song “Man in the Mirror” and purchased mirrors for all of his players so they could, you know, make that change. On another occasion, Dabo celebrated a big win by asking Kathleen to find a place in town where she could buy big orange foam fingers for all the players.

  As the school came to appreciate the correlation between investment and winning, the infrastructure dollars poured in. In early 2017, Clemson completed construction on an obscene $55 million playland for its football players, complete with a laser tag room, arcade, bowling alley, nap room, beach volleyball court, and miniature golf course.

  In Dabo Swinney’s world, a little extra is a big deal. He is obsessed with the details of football—of life, really. “That’s what we live by around here,” he says. “Do the common things in an uncommon way, and you can command the attention of the world. That’s from George Washington Carver.” He knows he can’t expect perfection from his players, but he does want them to be as fixated on details as he is, whether it’s a particular technique on how to run a route or the precise way they should arrange their lockers. (He provides them with two pictures, one showing the correct way and another the incorrect way.) He insists they clean up after themselves, so much so that when they go to the movies, the team brings its own trash blower. “If you talk to any movie theater manager, they’ll tell you that nobody has ever left their theater like we do,” Swinney says. “They don’t need to send anyone in there. There’s no
popcorn on the floor. Nobody cleans up after Clemson.”

  Swinney likes to call Clemson “a relationship-driven program,” but it is not easy to foment intimacy with a roster of over a hundred players, not to mention dozens of assistants and staff. Swinney accomplishes this through a communication structure that funnels knowledge his way. He meets every Monday with a leadership group he calls Swinney Council. It includes the senior leaders on the team, but those players will regularly invite younger guys to take part. Then there’s the Swinney Huddle, a group of assistants and staffers that meets every Tuesday. Swinney does not attend those gatherings, but the group produces a written report for him so he knows what they discussed.

  Between those two days, there are many more gatherings inside the team and around the program, all of which are designed to keep Swinney in the loop. He holds meetings with each player at the beginning and end of each season. And he makes sure he is around his guys as much as possible, from the family nights they have at the facility to the stretching lines, where he can walk up and down the line and exchange words more casually. The system is both efficient and comprehensive, which is not an easy needle to thread.

  Every day before practice, Swinney gathers his players in the team meeting room, where he will speak for about ten minutes, give or take, to set the tone for the day. The walls bear signs listing the sixteen team commandments as well as five goals for every season. When the players walk into the room, they are greeted by a slide that shows the view a driver has from behind the wheel of a car. The logo of last week’s opponent is in the rearview mirror; the next week’s opponent is visible through the windshield. Swinney also brings in two signs, one that reads BELIEF and another that shows the word CAN’T with the apostrophe and T crossed out. A countdown clock hangs on a wall, ticking down to the next opening kickoff. He will say a few words and then show the team a brief video taken from the extensive library he has his staff compile. Then he offers still more words. Swinney rarely prepares his remarks in advance. He may have some idea of what he wants to say, but mostly he speaks from the heart and follows the tangents wherever they lead.