Lars Anderson - Dabos World: The Life and Career of Coach Swinney and the Rise of Clemson Football

T here he was, alone in his South Carolina hotel room suite at the Hilton Garden Inn, alone with his coaching notes, alone at a desk, his head buried under the amber glow of lamplight. Over the previous quarter century, he had scribbled countless concepts and diagrams and coaching thoughts on pieces of paper that he had stored in folders and three-ring binders, and he dug through his most important pieces of information one more time at the hotel in the town of Anderson. A defining hour of his young life was fast approaching.

Throughout the day, he had projected an image of confidence and strengthduring morning meetings with coaches, his afternoon interactions with players, his exchanges with fansbut now in his suite, surrounded by silence on the evening of October 17, 2008, his heart thumped, a jackhammer pounding inside of his chest. His first game as interim head coach of the Clemson Tigers was slated to kick off the next afternoon, and at this moment, as darkness fell outside his hotel window, Dabo Swinney was a mess of nerves.

A planners planner, Dabo believed he was ready for his head-coaching debut. Just that night at the team hotelafter he had spoken to his players in a ballroom and told them how much he cared for them and loved themhe felt that his offense and defense and special teams were prepared to play at a high level against Georgia Tech. He knew that his well-thought-out pregame speech, one that he had been fine-tuning and waiting his entire coaching lifetwenty-five yearsto deliver, contained all the fire and passion and inspiration of a preacher in a Southern pulpit.

But the one thing Dabo hadnt practiced now really worried him: He had never run down the grassy, steepand often slipperyhill in the east end zone of Memorial Stadium, a pregame tradition for the players at Clemsons home field. As an assistant coach, Dabo had always walked onto the field through a different entrance with the other assistants, so he wasnt fully aware of any invisible booby traps that awaited him, especially because he would be wearing smooth-soled shoes rather than cleats like his players.

No head coach in Clemson history had ever led his players down that deep green grassy slope, but then again, Dabo was different. He wanted to show the fans his excitement, his passion, his love of the game, and his belief in the power of a singular possibilitythat he was the one who would lead the Tiger program, literally and figuratively, to the summit of college football. Yet here he was, fearful of losing his footing and tumbling down the hill, becoming a low-light reel blooper, a football klutz, not to mention a living symbol of the beginning of his tenure at Clemson, which many in coaching circles and in the national media believed was destined to fail. Heck, few outside of Clemson, South Carolina, had ever heard of this thirty-eight-year-old head coach with the quirky first name, a man who had never even been a coordinator for a football team before.

Just seven years earlier, he was out of football and working as a shopping center leasing agent in Birmingham, Alabama, talking traffic patterns and demographics and anchor stores with potential customers. Then Tommy Bowden hired him to coach the wide receivers at Clemson in 2003 and nowimprobablyhe was elevated to interim head coach when Bowden stepped down after a humbling 127 loss to Wake Forest. How rare was it for a position coach to become an interim head coach and then ascend to permanent head coach? Think of Halleys Comet streaking across the heavens: about once every seventy-five years.

Oh my God, thought Swinney in his hotel room on the eve of his first game, Im going to have to run down that hill in front of eighty-five thousand people and a bunch of people with TV cameras tomorrow. Yes, ready or not, Swinneys moment of reckoning on that hill was coming.

Dabo Swinney had been named interim head coach six days earlier on October 13, 2008, and he wanted his players to experience the intoxicating thrill of game day even before they reached the stadium. When he was an assistant, Dabo spent many Saturday mornings before kickoff meeting with recruits in a building away from the stadium. Once these meet and greets were over, hed stroll through the parking lots, chockablock with orange-clad fans tailgating from pop-up tents and cars and pickup trucks with Clemson flags sprouting from the flatbeds. Underneath the tents emblazoned with Tiger paws, fans grilled burgers and wings, tossed footballs and Frisbees, and sipped adult beverages. The atmosphere was electricthe sights, the smells, and the sounds overwhelmed Dabos sensesand that always jolted the assistant coach, spreading a pinch-me smile across his face, filling him with the belief that he was the luckiest dadgum man alive, one who had the best job in America, surrounded every autumn Saturday by the pomp and pageantry and poetry of college football. Now Dabo was determined to have his players feelreally feel, deep downthe full-body shiver of emotions that he always enjoyed during these pregame walks through the parking lots.

So after becoming interim head coach, Dabo called a meeting in his office with the state troopers who escorted the team buses from the football facility to the stadium on game days. Under Bowden and every other Clemson coach, the buses that ferried the players to the stadium had avoided traffic by taking a circuitous route using rural roads. But Dabo was adamant: He wanted the buses to drive through the middle of campus, through the beating heart of the tailgating fans, so his players could understand how the game was so important to so many. The team had often played lifeless, listless football through the first half of the 2008 seasona who-really-cares attitude had infected the roster and was a major reason why Bowden was no longer the head coachand Dabo wanted his players to experience the heat of the fans passion, to let it wash over them and, he hoped, inspire them to play the game of their lives.