How Dabo Swinney Changed the Culture of Football and Made Clemson a Winner

Of course Woody McCorvey remembers the first time he saw Dabo Swinney. Everyone remembers the first time he sees Dabo Swinney. For McCorvey, it was 1990. He was an assistant coach at Alabama, and Swinney was a walk-on receiver, dreaming of getting playing time someday and maybe a scholarship, too.

So what was it? Swinney's great speed? His fantastic hands? His toughness?         

"He was always taking notes," McCorvey said. "He was in the room with the receivers and the tight ends [for meetings]. I coached both. And he was in there with the scholarship players, too. And he was always there…an avid note-taker.

"He still has all of those notes, too."

OK. Well, that's not everyone's dream, to be remembered for excessive, copious, compulsive note-taking. But it is something.

Year	W-L	Bowl
2008	4-3	Gator Bowl-L
2009	9-5	Music City Bowl-W
2010	6-7	Meineke Car Care Bowl-L
2011	10-4	Orange Bowl-L
2012	11-2	Chick-fil-A Bowl-W
2013	11-2	Orange Bowl-W
2014	10-3	Russell Athletic Bowl-W
2015	13-0	Orange Bowl-TBD

And it does at least start to explain where Swinney has gone from there. He got that scholarship, helped Alabama win a national championship in 1992 as a starter and has since taken a somewhat straight line all the way to a head coaching job at Clemson, where he built the Tigers into the No. 1 team in the country. They'll play Oklahoma on Thursday in the Orange Bowl in a College Football Playoff semifinal. 

The full meaning of Dabo Swinney is still being determined. For years, he was just the butt of Steve Spurrier's jabs and jokes, playing the underdog in-state rival to Spurrier and not quite breaking through on Clemson's inferiority complex. Now, Dabo is on top. He is two wins from being king, from being the face of college football.

Over those years, something strange has happened in the world of college coaches. They aren't tough guys blowing a whistle anymore. You have one class of CEOs—such as Nick Saban, a stern, personality-free computer of a man, or Urban Meyer—and another of geniuses and gurus such as Auburn's Gus Malzahn.

Where do you go from there? What era will Swinney usher in? An end of self-importance? Please, please, please. Will coaches start throwing pizza parties for their towns? Renting out amusement parks?

Put it this way: Can you imagine a coach before Swinney jumping in and joining his team in celebration by doing the Whip and the Nae Nae in—how do we say this?—a slightly awkward way?

If you went to a club with a group of friends and started dancing the way he does, you would very quickly be unable to find your friends. He's doing it while leading the No. 1 team in a sport with a tough-guy tradition and mentality.

"The first time he did that," running back Wayne Gallman said, "he jumped in and did a move, and we're like 'Nooooooo!'"

His old college roommate at Alabama, Chris Donnelly, had been going right along with Swinney's success, celebrating every step. And then he saw the dance.

"I always thought I was at the same level as him as a dancer, and we both thought we had good moves," Donnelly said. "I didn't remember his dancing being that bad. Maybe mine was that bad, too."

The thing is: There's something to that dance. To the way he does it. Not the awkwardness of it, but the reason. It's his permanent joy and upbeat mentality. That's why they stick with him, follow him.

Bleacher Report has asked old teammates of his, coaches, assistants past and present and even Swinney himself: Where does that mentality come from?

"It beats the alternative," Swinney said. "I learned that a long time ago. It's a lot better to be positive than to be negative. That's what the Bible says. Worrying doesn't add a day to your life."

Joe Skipper/Associated Press

The truth is, there is no simple explanation for why Swinney is the way he is. He has a background filled with family issues and bootstrap-pulling—and that might help to explain his success, but his demeanor is his great accomplishment.

"If anyone had the right to feel sorry for himself or put his head down, it would be him," Donnelly said. "And he never did. I knew what he went through and what he'd been through. I was one of his roommates with him and with his mom—his mom would be struggling—and he was still a glass-half-full guy."

I think Swinney's glass is totally full.

But as for his mom…Swinney has the kind of family background that people will sometimes use to explain their lifetime of failure. In fact, that's exactly why he tells his current team about his childhood, a few players told me, so they know that every path can lead to success.

Swinney, who's 46, grew up in Alabama. His mom, Carol, spent most of her early childhood in a children's hospital with polio. His dad all but abandoned the family, and his mom raised him and his two older brothers with a low-paying job. They moved from home to home when they couldn't afford one or were kicked out of another.

When he went to the University of Alabama, he got an apartment with roommates. Carol had to move in with them. Wouldn't that cramp the style of his roommates?

"It was my senior year," Donnelly said. "I had a girlfriend at the time—who became my wife—and she lived in Birmingham. So no, it wasn't cramping my style. But even if it was, it wouldn't have been an issue. It is what it is. What are you going to do?

"It was actually nice because she cooked meals, did laundry. She was very, very, very sweet."

McCorvey said he didn't know at the time about Swinney's family's struggles. But he certainly had heard of Carol.

The scariest night of the week for a college football coach is Thursday. That's the night that players have a little more freedom, their last taste of it before a game, so coaches are nervous that the phone might ring.

"Coaches worry about the players getting into trouble and all," McCorvey said. "But on Thursday nights we never had to worry. These guys went over to Dabo's place."

That would be Dabo and Carol's place. What on earth would make college football players spend their last night of freedom doing that?

"Let's be honest," Donnelly said. "His mom was a heck of a cook."

Roman Colburn was another teammate in the Thursday night group at the Swinney's.

"Yeah," he said. "His mom would have a home-cooked meal for all of us. She would bring cookies to the players and stuff like that, too. She was real close to the players. As far as how he was really struggling, I guess I'm glad I just didn't know."

Colburn described it as a brotherhood and a family.

Funny, Gallman described the current Clemson team the same way.

Jamie Rhodes-USA TODAY Sports

"That's one of the reasons I wanted to come here," he said. "You just get the family feel for everything being around this team."

Wednesday night at Clemson now is family night. Coaches and families eat with the players. That includes, of course, Dabo's wife, Kathleen. They have known each other since the first grade.

Oh, Swinney's teammates had other stories about him, too. Donnelly said they had an intramural softball team—the Ballers—and basketball team, and Swinney took it upon himself to organize and captain both of them. That came on one condition: Swinney got to play shortstop and point guard.

Donnelly also said his first impression of Swinney—again, everyone remembers—was, "It's the middle of two-a-days in 108-degree heat, and I'm dying, and we're doing calisthenics. Dabo was always so positive and upbeat that I used to joke with him all the time: 'What world are you living in? I want to be in that world. I'm dying out here, and you're smiling.' "

Colburn talked about a drill when quarterbacks were throwing to receivers. Swinney, he said, would catch the ball, then quickly run back and butt in front of the others in line.

"I said, 'What are you doing?'" Colburn said. "He said, 'The record is 20 straight catches, and I'm going to break that today. He was still a walk-on, and he was trying to break the record. That stuck with me as I got older."

What also stuck with him was that Swinney had learned not only his own passing routes but also all the other receivers' routes.

"He was like a quarterback," Colburn said. "He was a guy always taking copious notes."

Again, the notes.

Are they really important to him? Yes, and he still takes them.

"Oh yeah, I've got to be careful about them," Clemson defensive coordinator Brent Venables said. "I'll say, 'This guy's too slow' or whatever, and he pulls out notes and says, 'Well, a year ago, you said…'"

Come on.

"Oh yeah," said SMU coach Chad Morris, who had been Swinney's offensive coordinator at Clemson from 2011 to 2014. "And he's caused me to do the same thing. I got a binder when I was with him and have notes from every day we had a meeting. I know exactly what we did on, say, Sept. 14, 2013. I know what was said in the staff meetings."

Think about this: Swinney was a freshman at Alabama in 1989. After he played at Alabama, he was an assistant coach there for a while and then sold real estate for two years before coming to Clemson as an assistant and being promoted in 2008. That's about a quarter-century's worth of notes.

Exactly where does Swinney store them?

"I have every note," Swinney said. "I have all my…I just…I have a very neat house. I'm not a pack rat. But I do write all the time, and I always have. I've got all my papers I wrote in middle school and high school, and all my notes I wrote in college. All my notes; stacks of notes in boxes now and a lot of stuff in my office.

"When you commit stuff to writing it, it sticks with you."

He said he goes back and studies them all the time.

Today, his past all adds up and together into the goofy, lovable, positive, bad-dancing coach that Swinney is. Quarterback Deshaun Watson described him as the "realest coach I've ever talked to and been around. He makes sure you're a great citizen first and foremost and get your degree."

Bob Leverone/Associated Press

And the Alabama past and Clemson present are closer together than you might expect. McCorvey is an associate athletic director at Clemson. Thad Turnipseed, a former Swinney teammate at Alabama, is the recruiting director. Another of Swinney's teammate's, Lemanski Hall, is a defensive analyst.

And when Clemson has its summer camps, McCorvey said, a lot of visitors are former Alabama players.

Colburn said that in some ways, he's more comfortable at Clemson now than at Alabama. His son, Reese, who's 11, has had three open heart surgeries. He is doing well now but might never be cleared to play football, which he really wants to do. So Colburn asked Swinney if Reese could stand on the sideline during a kid's camp one day and wear a Clemson T-shirt.

"He sent me a text back that night saying, 'We're going to do more than that. He's going to stand by me, and we're going to put him in for one play, then he can come out, catch his breath, go back in for another play…'"

"It was amazing. I know we used to be teammates, but he didn't have to do that. He didn't have to do it."

This does bring up one issue. If Clemson beats Oklahoma and Alabama beats Michigan State in the other semifinal, it will set up a Clemson-Alabama national championship game. And if there are former Alabama players coming to Clemson camps, exactly which team will those players be rooting for?

Donnelly said he wasn't going to answer that question. Colburn said Alabama is in his blood, but his dream would be for Swinney to become the head coach at Alabama whenever Saban retires.

He'd be a deserving successor to Saban, at Alabama or just as the face of college football. He has rebuilt Clemson through his smarts, toughness, organization, endless optimism and ability to relate to players no matter what their family situation may be.

Jim Dedmon-USA TODAY Sports

Swinney said that when the program "changed from the inside, it blossomed on the outside. You can't ever do it the other way. Just like a person: A person's not going to change until he gets his heart right. Until you get the inside of you right, your outer is never going to be right."

McCorvey said that in a world where coaches work every minute compulsively, Swinney coaches his son's little league team and insists that his assistant coaches don't come to work until after they've driven their kids to school.

One more thing on notes: Swinney said that at the start of every year, he writes out a personal state of the union. And he also goes back every year and re-reads all of his previous state of the union notes. 

It gives him a feel for where things have been and where they're going.

The state of the union is good.

Greg Couch covers college football for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter @gregcouch.