First-year football coach Dave Clawson made a bold statement the day he was hired by the University.
Without hesitation and with a confidence you could trust, Clawson said he would win with the Falcons; not next year or the year after, but this season.
‘You don’t want to promise more than you can deliver on, but certainly our expectations here ‘- with the players we have in the program and the success that they’ve had here in recent years ‘- is that this is not a program that needs to be gutted and started from scratch,’ Clawson said on Dec. 12. ‘We need players to buy in to what we’re going to do, and our goal is win right away.’
Yesterday, Clawson revealed that he made an even more powerful statement behind closed doors when he introduced himself to the team.
‘Our guys really wanted to win,’ he said during yesterday’s press conference. ‘The first time I met the team, I said to them, ‘The only way this is going to work and we’re going to have early success is I’m going to treat you guys as if I recruited you. I’m adopting you. You’re my recruits, and you’re my players. You have to treat me and our coaching staff like you came here to play for us.’
”And I don’t want to hear that this is what you were told or this is the way you did in the past because none of that stuff is going to help us. It’s going to hurt us.”
Now a year and seven wins later and on the heels of earning a bowl bid, Clawson has come full circle, showing the athletic department, students and outside fans that he is a man of his word and the type of coach anyone would want leading their program.
Never once has it been about him this season. And I feel confident being able to say it never will be about him. Maybe when he retires from the long, successful career he is bound to have, it will be about him for at least a moment.
But even then, I can see him saying something along these lines at his final press conference. ‘I’ve been privileged to meet so many outstanding young men in my years of coaching. The coaching awards and championships have been nice for me, but it’s the lasting relationships that I’ve helped players build that are really the pinnacle of my career.’
Asked what grade he would give himself for this season, he refused to give himself a mark, instead choosing to give credit to his assistant coaches.
And in typical Clawson fashion, he rained down praise on his players because he knows that without them, he is just a want-to-be coach holding an empty clipboard.
‘I really appreciate our seniors,’ he said. ‘I’ve been involved in other transitions that your senior class, instead of jumping in and buying in, kind of fight you, ‘That’s not the way we do things and we’re not used to that.’ We had 20 seniors. Did all of them jump in all the way? No. But most of them did.’
Even when the team was 1-4 and on a four-game losing streak, there was never a ‘What if Gregg Brandon was still here?’ question among players, who instead chose to rally together and put themselves in a winning position.
The climax came on Nov. 26 when Clawson allowed the seniors to conduct the ‘tone-setter’ meeting he has with the team before every game. A conceited and greedy Clawson could have entered that meeting and told his team to go out and win so he could make good on the promise he had made almost a year earlier, but he chose to let the seniors talk.
At 6-6 and set to face Toledo, the seniors could have said a lot of different things about winning, but their choice was more powerful and the one that Clawson was most proud of all.
‘We had so many guys that their motivation for winning the game wasn’t just to beat Toledo, wasn’t their last game at the Doyt, wasn’t to win seven games,’ Clawson said. ‘A lot of them said ‘Guys we need to win this game because if we win this game we get to stay a team for another month.”
While we know BG’s ultimate fate until Sunday, there’s no good reason to think the Falcons won’t be invited to a bowl game, putting a bow on this special season.
