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Re: The big buzzword: Culture
Aug 25, 2019, 7:04 AM
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The main thing they don't understand about it is that it starts with character...both the kind of guys you hire as coaches and recruit as players, and the way Dabo conducts himself personally.
You can use the word "culture" like it's a magic pill or blueprint all day long, but at the end of the day the first and most meaningful ingredient - the "starter yeast", as it were, for everything that follows - is Dabo's own insistence on doing the right thing. Even if it costs him, he is honest. He is up-front with recruits from Minute 1 and does not sugar coat...if he sees you as, say, a DB, as he did with Dak Joyner, he will tell you so even if others are telling you that you're a QB because they know that's what you want to hear. If you're the #2 guy on the recruiting board and he wants someone else more, he will tell you so, as he did with Lyn-J Dixon when we were recruiting Zeus White, and it almost cost us Dixon.
He can also say "no"...talented or not, that kid doesn't fit our culture. That's hard, especially when the kid is right there to be had for the signing, and you know how talented he is even if he is a bit of a bad apple...but he does it. Over and over. Every year you see guys mysteriously drop off Clemson's board for no apparent reason and we've moved on to next with no fanfare and no public proclamation, even if the new guy has three stars (or occasionally none!) and the old guy had four or five.
He puts academic concerns over football. If a kid isn't getting it done in the classroom, he doesn't play. If a kid has pressing academic concerns, he attends to those before he comes to practice or suits up.
He pays his assistants extremely well. Dabo did get his in the end because he was so incredibly successful, but before he did all that he sacrificed a bunch of his own salary up front so he could attract the best assistant coaches...and Oh My, did he ever. From Minute 1 it was obvious the best veteran coaches out there, guys like Dan Brooks, Marion Hobby, and Robbie Caldwell were willing to work for him, and he ended up pulling Venables away from Oklahoma for exactly the same reason.
He plays everybody who deserves to play, even though it means spending September dealing with an awesome pile of Young Guy mistakes. Clemson usually runs like an untuned big-block V-8 in September because of it...rough. Sputtering. But by the playoffs we're roaring past the likes of Notre Dame and even Alabama because of our immense depth too, as other teams are gimping towards the finish line held together by duct tape and Cortisone injections.
He won't risk a kid's health even if it's advantageous to play him. Tre Lamar comes to mind. Lamar had stinger issues - which amounts to tweaks in his spinal column that were causing numbess and tingling - and even though he was medically cleared to play in the playoffs two years ago and definitely could have helped us, Dabo just shook his head and held him. He knew the main thing with stingers was repeated impacts and he knew Lamar needed time to heal up fully. And so...our best run-stuffing LB remained on the bench even in that ugly smash-mouth playoff game against Alabama in 2017-2018 that we ultimately ended up losing. It had to have killed Dabo (you could see it was killing Tre Lamar!)...but it was absolutely the right call. One game was simply not worth the risk of paralyzing a player, even one that important.
All players turn off social media during the season. The only voices they hear during the season are the voices of the coaches...and one another. It works in no small part because Clemson is so isolated, an island in the middle of rural Upstate South Carolina. In a big town or a city it'd be impossible because the hangers-on and media and bloggers would be everywhere. In Clemson they can filter all that out.
That's "culture"...a million small but critical details that end up creating an atmosphere where players, coaches, and staff feel valued, included, and protected, and where doing the right thing is not just expected but demanded. And the terrible secret to Clemson's "culture" is that not only is it not about winning, Clemson wins so many games precisely because the focus is not and never has been about winning.
How on Earth is a newly hired coach somewhere else, who is desperate for wins and results so as to prove his worth to the fan base who must support him, the locker room that has to believe in him, and the AD who can fire him, supposed to replicate that? How many have the personal character to even begin to try? Without being genuine there's no point in even attempting it. This only works if your head guy can also walk the walk or no one will buy it.
Good luck. We caught lightning in a bottle here at Clemson, and we may literally never see this particular convergence of factors again. And replicating what we do here anywhere else is going to be hard...and in a lot of places, it's going to be flat-out impossible.
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