By Will Vandervort.

By Will Vandervort

It was not too long after he announced he was coming back to Clemson for his senior year that Tajh Boyd received a text message from head coach Dabo Swinney.

The text said, “Rodney Williams is the all-time winning-est quarterback here. He won 32 games. You have won 21. I will let you do the math. Welcome back! Let’s go to work!”

Boyd just smiled after reading it, and thought to himself, “I’ll just have to win all twelve of them, then.”

“It will be fun. I will be a good challenge for him,” Swinney said.

There is no doubt Boyd, who received the McArthur Award for the nation’s top athlete from a Virginia high school at the Norfolk Sports Club Jamboree Tuesday night, wants to make his senior year at Clemson his best one yet. In his first two years he has not only posted a 21-6 record as the starting quarterback, but he already owns 51 Clemson records, which includes career standards in touchdown passes, touchdown responsibility, passing efficiency and 300-yard passing games.

“He wants to have a great year. He wants to be successful. He wants to lead,” Swinney said. “He is a little bit of a perfectionist, which is okay at that position. But I think he has learned to handle that better.”

From criticism after bad throws, to great praise after great plays, Boyd has matured into the kind of quarterback Swinney and offensive coordinator Chad Morris believe can take the Tigers to the next level. Seemingly, the fifth-year quarterback has found a place that keeps him grounded no matter what has happened.

After throwing an interception in Monday’s practice, Boyd did not gripe, complain or try to make any excuses. Instead, he walked over to Morris and asked what he did wrong and then went to the next play.

“I hated it. Honestly, I wanted to walk off the field,” Boyd said. “I had a hot guy right here, and I tried to do something else with it and get creative with it. It did not work out that way.”

But Boyd knew he could not linger on his mistake. He knew there were others watching him. Others who look up to him and view him as a team-leader; it’s his job not to show such emotions, but instead be an example on how to act in difficult moments.

“My body language carries weight,” the Clemson quarterback said. “I’m not saying I’m feeling that way, but a lot of other guys see it as well so it is all about, in a sense, having emotion, but being emotionless all at the same time.”

Though all the yards, touchdowns and the other statistics are what you want from the quarterback position, it’s the little things, the things that no one outside the football program sees, that make Boyd’s return for the 2013 season immeasurable.

“He is a veteran and he handles himself like a veteran should,” Swinney said. “I thought he was very driven and focused last year coming off his first full year, but now that he has had another year of success and was improved in other areas, that has made him that much more hungry.

“He has a real sense of urgency. He is real comfortable with who he is, in his ability and what we are asking him to do. We have several new things that we are challenging him with from a schematic standpoint that he is excited about… He is a great leader. He smiles a lot. He has a better presence to him.”

Boyd, who is listed as the No. 2 player in the Heisman Trophy race according to Athlon, understands he still has some work to do. Fundamentally, he is still inconsistent at times with his footwork, while he also likes to take too many chances.

Both contributed to interceptions on Monday. He had poor footwork on one throw which got away from him and sailed into a defender’s arm, while another came because he tried to force a football in a small window when he had a receiver wide open for a short gain on a hot route.

“Some of the great quarterbacks, they don’t always look for the home run shot,” Boyd said. “They take what is there. Sometimes you have to take the small things.”

Boyd threw 13 interceptions in 2012, one more than he did in 2011. But he also threw 36 touchdown passes, three more than he did the year before. He also fumbled five less times and contributed to eight less sacks.

“The goal is to end each possession with a kick,” Boyd said. “If you end a possession with an extra point, field goal or punt, odds are nothing bad is going to happen.”

Last year Alabama and Notre Dame, the two teams that played for the BCS National Championship, only committed 15 turnovers. Clemson had 21, and 16 of those came from Boyd.

“It is all about taking care of the ball,” Swinney said. “That’s one of the things we challenged him with.

“He has to do a better job taking care of the ball. He still led our team in fumbles, although he cut them down last year. Although he cut his sacks down from the year before, he still had eight sacks by himself. There is a lot of room for him to improve, but we hold him to a very high standard.”

But not as high as the standard in which Boyd holds himself to.

“I feel like we had a pretty good season and one of the best in recent memory at 11-2, but if I chop down half of those or even four or five, who knows what the results could have been,” he said. “It is all about me taking care of the ball, run this team and just be the engineer.

“I have to be as accurate as I can be in those situations.”

That’s why instead of hitting the beaches of Florida or the Bahamas, Boyd traveled to California to work at George Whitfield’s Quarterback Academy for a second straight spring break. He, along with teammate Chad Kelly, worked on his footwork and how to incorporate his entire body into a throw the proper way.

“I did not want to go, personally, through spring break kind of just coasting it,” Boyd said. “I don’t think there is time to coast. In seven months, this season is over for me. I’m just trying to put my best foot forward in any situation.”

And who knows, maybe in the end, all that hard work will allow him to leave Clemson as the all-time winning-est quarterback. At least that is the challenge he has accepted.