Chad Morris was alone on a chilly beach, framed by a winter sun, seeking to land the right one for a persistent seagull. His mobile phone rang at exactly 12:28 p.m.
The caller ID showed Dabo Swinney.
“He asked me what I was doing and the conversation began then,” Morris recalled on the 2 Left Turns podcast. “He was already talking about his list and what he was thinking of from a coordinator perspective. So I just gazed at him — we have a wonderful relationship — and said, ‘Coach, your list is one, and that’s me.’”
The gesture was the climax of a decade-long journey that led Morris to leave Clemson in 2014, heading for head coaching positions and, sooner or later, a tactical sabbatical.
But the “recruiting” didn’t end with Morris.
Swinney, a master of the personal touch, understood that the hire took more than just a playbook: It took a family.
That Tuesday evening Swinney calls again.
This time he wanted to catch up with Morris’s wife, Paula. “He gets her on the phone … and he is like, ‘Well, you want to come back home?’ ” Morris replied, his tone raising in emotion. “She had made that comment and she said, ‘Coach, I would crawl back to Clemson for you and Kathleen.’”
For Morris, the return is more than a professional lateral. It is the closing of a circle. The man who laid Clemson’s offensive identity in 2011 comes back to find a “branding institute” and expanded facilities, but the overarching purpose hasn’t changed.
“The background of me is so much made from right here,” Morris said. “It was not a one call thing. It was a series of conversations… [it’s] vital to know how special this place has been to our family.”