When Dabo Swinney won the Bear Bryant Award last month as the best coach in college football, he went a little off script. He caught everyone in the audience a little off guard when he called his longtime friend and mentor up on the stage.
Well, he caught almost everyone by surprise.
“Really, nothing he does surprises me anymore,” Clemson’s associated athletic director for football Woody McCorvey said while laughing.
As Swinney said so eloquently at the award’s dinner that night in Houston, Texas, McCorvey is his coach.
“He is a guy that has always believed in me,” Swinney said. “That’s number one. And then, he is a guy that I trust.”
That trust began in 1990 when Swinney was a walk-on wide receiver at the University of Alabama and played for McCorvey, who was his position coach. Even then, when Swinney still that young kid from Pelham, Ala., McCorvey saw something special in him.
“I saw it early on as a player,” McCorvey said. “Every day he came to practice, he came to work. Bill Belichick has a saying, ‘Do your job.’ And that is what Dabo did every day. He did his job.”
That is why when Swinney, a sophomore at the time, got his opportunity to play at Alabama, he was prepared. In back-to-back weeks, the Crimson Tide lost two of its receivers to injury.
“I had some guys that weren’t really doing what we needed them to do for us offensively,” McCorvey said. “That is why I decided I was going to give him the opportunity, and he made the most of it. He did it just by doing his job every day.
“Just the energy that he brought, just his passion for the game and all of that, you could see it then.”
No surprise, Swinney was also a good communicator and everyone, not just on the offense, on the entire team liked him.
“He was a great communicator,” McCorvey said. “Everybody liked him because of his work habits and what he brought to the team every day.”
When Swinney graduated in 1993, he already had a job lined up in Birmingham to work in the health environment business. However, Swinney knew that was not his calling or his passion. He wanted to coach.
So, Swinney approached McCorvey and expressed his interest to him.
“I put him in front of Coach (Gene) Stallings and Coach Stallings gave him an opportunity,” McCorvey said. “He started out in the weight room, and he took that opportunity and the next thing you knew he was a graduate assistant and then when the opportunity came to hire him, we were able to hire him as a receivers coach.
“So really, he never left. From the time he was a player, and it was not long after that, he was a part of our staff and he worked his way up.”
McCorvey and Swinney were together for seven years at Alabama. The last two years, in 1996 and 1997, Swinney worked under McCorvey, who was the offensive coordinator.
“He fought for me to be the guy at 26 years old to coach the receivers and the tight ends when he was the offensive coordinator,” Swinney said. “Our relationship goes a long time back. He is one of the most respected people that I have ever known in the business. He is always consistent.”
Flash forward to December 1, 2008, when Swinney was named the full-time head coach at Clemson. He knew he was going to need someone to help him in the program. He needed someone he could trust.
He needed McCorvey.
“I knew I needed to have an extra set of eyes and ears to help me build a program from a day-to-day basis,” Swinney said. “We just did not really have a big infrastructure here. Not only did I have to have someone, but I needed somebody that I could trust. Somebody that knew me and knew how I thought. He was the perfect fit for that.”
Swinney eventually talked McCorvey into joining his staff at Clemson and together, they built a culture at Clemson that has made Clemson the best program in college football.
“You don’t know how impactful Woody McCorvey has been in my life,” Swinney said. “He has been right by my side.”
And right by his side, McCorvey smiles and he smiles proudly.
“I enjoy watching him coach and work on the field every day. But I get the biggest enjoyment when I see him rub that rock and run down that hill,” McCorvey said. “He exemplifies energy.”
Move over Alabama, Clemson is the new King of College Football. In our new magazine “Little Ole Clemson”: The Best “Little” Dynasty Ever, we examine not just the 2018 team’s run to being “the best ever” but examine the last four seasons and how Dabo Swinney turned Clemson into the new dynasty of college football. We also take a look at the role former athletic director Terry Don Phillips played. We go behind the scenes at the Tigers’ run to a second national championship in three seasons and the previous three national championship runs. It also features stories on the Power Rangers, the 2018 senior class, high quality photos and much, much more.
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