Dabo's World by Lars Anderson

Author:Lars Anderson [Anderson, Lars]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

That off-season in college football, the Tennessee Volunteers hired Lane Kiffin, who had been fired in the middle of the previous season from the NFL’s Oakland Raiders after stumbling to a 1-3 start. The Auburn Tigers hired Gene Chizik from Iowa State, who had a record of 5-19 in his previous two seasons. But of all the new hires at major schools in 2009, Dabo appeared to be the biggest risk—and the one most likely to fail because of his inexperience. When asked if he thought the school was taking a chance and gambling on him, he said, “No! If you are asking me, it’s a pretty good bet. I don’t mean that in an arrogant way. I’m confident in my abilities and always have been. I believe in myself.”

Dabo ate his meals in the cafeteria of the football facility, not in his office or in a film room like many coaches did. He wanted to be as close to his players as possible, and he needed every player—from the starting quarterback to the fifth-string free safety—to consider him approachable. He believed that if he ate with his players, they would be more inclined to reach out to him when they had a problem or just wanted to shoot the bull. Fostering tight relationships with his players and coaches was paramount to Dabo, and he tried to work on those relationships every day on the job. He also had a noon basketball game that he played in; anyone was welcome as long as they didn’t foul the head coach too hard.

But Dabo’s long-term plan for Clemson extended far beyond building relationships and creating a family atmosphere. He may be the only coach in America with an undergraduate degree in commerce and business administration while also holding a master’s degree in business administration. He talked to the higher-ups in the athletic department about the bell curve of a typical business: First there is birth, then growth, then decline, then eventually death. But Dabo repeatedly emphasized that the great businesses never plateau and never begin that downward spiral of decline. Instead, they figure out ways to consistently grow and evolve. This means you constantly have to reinvent yourself as a leader, reinvest in your product, reset how you do business, keep learning, keep innovating, keep growing, and—perhaps most important—keep changing.

Dabo only needed to direct his bosses’ attention to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to make his point. Nick Saban was constantly evolving. Most everyone in college football circles knew that Saban had a prototype for what he was looking for at each position, a height-weight-speed definition of the perfect player that Saban developed with Bill Belichick when Saban was the defensive coordinator for the Browns in 1991 and Belichick was the head coach. Unlike other teams that used scouts who had their own ideas and matrices of judging and measuring football skills, Belichick and Saban wanted to develop the team’s own system for evaluating talent. So before the coaches looked at individual college players, the staff defined what they wanted in a player at each position.

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