Through hard work, perseverance, Dabo Swinney made sure he was noticed
PARADISE VALLEY, Ariz. — By now, with the national championship game finally about to kick off, Dabo Swinney’s history with Alabama is well-known. Well, sort of. The other day, when someone asked the Clemson coach, “How would you describe yourself as a player? What do you think got you noticed by Coach Bryant?” — referring to Paul “Bear” Bryant — Swinney didn’t miss a beat.
“I wish I got noticed by Coach Bryant,” he said. “Man, I ain’t that old. Coach Bryant was — unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to play for Coach Bryant. I played for Coach (Gene) Stallings.”
Paul “Bear” Bryant retired after the 1982 season and died in January 1983, when Swinney was 13.
This much, though, is true: Swinney, who’s from the Birmingham suburb of Pelham, walked on at Alabama. He earned a scholarship. He won a national championship.
People noticed him. And they describe Swinney as a player in much the same way he does: as an average talent who maximized his abilities through hard work.
“Persistence, perserverance, toughness, knowledge of the game,” Swinney said. “Those are the things that — I tell everybody, ‘You’ve just got to be the best you can be with what you have.’”
Earlier this season, when Swinney coined the acronym B.Y.O.G. — “Bring your own guts” –— Northern Illinois athletic director Sean Frazier, a former teammate, nodded knowingly.
“He’s not about flash,” said Frazier, who walked on at Alabama and played linebacker. “He’s a bootstrap guy. ‘B.Y.O.G.’? That is Dabo.”
Swinney walked on during the spring of 1989, after his first semester at Alabama. Tommy Bowden was Swinney’s first position coach before moving on to Kentucky with head coach Bill Curry, but he recalls Swinney as “a hard worker, an overachiever who played with an edge, like all walk-ons do.” Years later, with Swinney out of coaching, Bowden hired him at Clemson.
“It’s not what you know,” Bowden said, “it’s who you know.”
And what they remember. Woody McCorvey, who became Alabama’s receivers coach when Swinney was a sophomore, said Swinney stood out in meetings, taking copious notes, and then in practices.
“You were gonna see him every day do something out of the ordinary that a lot of those scholarship guys didn’t do,” said McCorvey, who’s now on Swinney’s staff as Clemson’s associate athletic director for football administration. “He was gonna always leave his feet and go catch the ball. He was gonna make an exceptional block. He was gonna give extra effort on special teams and those kinds of things.”
Swinney understood his limitations, too.
“I wasn’t gonna outrun Kevin Lee, I wasn’t gonna run by Antonio Langham,” he said, referring to some of those more talented teammates. “But that didn’t mean that I couldn’t be the best version of Dabo.”
But Swinney compared himself — as did McCorvey — to Clemson receiver Hunter Renfrow, a former walk-on who has emerged as a key player as a redshirt freshman. His 35-yard touchdown catch in the Orange Bowl helped shift momentum to the Tigers as they beat Oklahoma.
“He’s faster than I was,” Swinney said of Renfrow. “He definitely does not have better hands than I did, but he’s faster. … You know, he’s tough as nails, maybe kind of surprises people a little bit from time to time.”
With Alabama’s receiving corps plagued by injuries and poor play during the 1990 season, McCorvey decided to pull Swinney off the scout team and put him in the receivers’ rotation. A year later, Swinney received a scholarship. He became a solid contributor. In 1992, Alabama won the national championship, upsetting Miami.
“He went out on a limb for me as a player,” Swinney said, “and for the next three years it was just a great journey.”
Said McCorvey: “I just wanted somebody to do their job. We gave him an opportunity, and he was able to do it. It was kind of like Renfrow for us right now — you couldn’t help but notice him.”
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