PARADISE VALLEY, Ariz.– Life is good for Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney these days.

His top-ranked ACC team is 14-0 and set to play for the College Football Playoff National championship against SEC champion Alabama (13-1) Monday night at the University of Phoenix Stadium.  He is currently working on an eight-year contract in Jan. 2014 that pay him a $3.3 million base salary plus bonuses and includes a raise of more than $1.1 million and runs through the 2021 season. But he is in line for a new contract extension that should play him upwards to $5 million dollars, which would put in among the Top 10 coaches in the sport..

No one will begrudge him winning this lottery.

The 46-year old Swinney has led the Tigers to a 75-26 record in seven plus seasons and has transformed Clemson into a brand name, winning 10 or more games in five of those seasons. “We’ve got a big challenge,” Swinney admitted. “You’ve got to slay a dragon. This is a lot easier said than done, and everybody knows that when you’re going to try to beat Alabama.”
Alabama is a six and a half point favorite, but Swinney doesn’t seem stressed out by the challenge.

“To me, it would be stressed to come up here at a National Championship setting and be all stressed out. Stressed out about what,” I mean I’m too blessed to be stressed. This is just a joy and a privilege. For us, this is just another step up the mountain. It just further solidifies who we are as a program. We’re not just a flash in the pan. We’ve been terribly consistent. No one pays much attention to that.

“You can come to Clemson and do anything. We’ve got like 38 guys in the NFL right now. We’ve had 120 seniors since I’ve been head coach, 114 of them have graduated. We had just about every national award. We were a little short on the Heisman, but we’ve done all that.

When I first got the job, it was well you’re Clemson, you play in the ACC, you don’t beat anybody. /Well check our record against the SEC, Check our record in all big games. We’re just kind of been laying in the weeds for seven years doing what we do.”

Swinney has been through enough in his personal life to weather any storm.

Swinney is from Pelham, Ala. where the family had an idyllic life in the Birmingham suburbs. Swinney grew up on Alabama football, picking up his love for the Crimson Tide from his late father Erv, who idolized Bear Bryant. One of Swinney’s fondest memories as a child was going with his father and two brothers to the 1980 Sugar Bowl to watch his beloved Tide defeat Arkansas 24-7.

Swinney dreamed about playing for the late, iconic coach Bear Bryant, who had won seven national championships in 25 years and established the Tide as the premier program in the deep South. “I wish he had come to Pelham to recruit me, but it didn’t happen.”
The Bear passed in 1984.

Swinney eventually lived his dream, going from a walk on in Gene Stallings’ program to become the starting wide receiver as a senior for the Tide in 1992 when they upset Miami to win the national championship, then spending the next 13 years on the ‘Bama coaching staff.
But Swinney’s journey had some unexpected detours.

When Swinney was in high school, his father’s washing machine repair business began to fail and Erv found himself more than $250,000 in debt. As Erv struggled to pay off his debts, he turned to drinking out of frustration and Swinney escaped much of the domestic violence in the house by sleeping in the car. His mother hoped to keep the family together until her youngest graduated from high school but she finally left when the abuse became too much. The two divorced and the family home was foreclosed.

With his older brothers gone, Dabo and his mother stayed in motels and then moved into a condominium. They were evicted after only three months because they couldn’t afford to pay the rent. His mother earned $8 an hour working in a department store. They temporarily moved into the small apartment of Dabo’s grandmother and then bounced around friends’ homes. Despite their struggles, Swinney was an honor roll student and football star in high school. He enrolled at the University of Alabama in 1988 and shortly after he moved to Tuscaloosa, he invited his mother to move there and invited her to stay in his room in a tiny apartment he shared with his roommate, a friend from Pelham.

They made it work.

Carol McIntosh kept her job in Birmingham and worked nights and weekends. The two shared a bed for three years until they could afford a three bedroom house. On McIntosh’s off days, she cooked chicken and dumplings and other meals for Swinney and his friends. She attended Fellowship of Christian Athletes meetings with her sons and Bible studies at the coaches’ house, and she watched Swinney play softball and basketball games in recreation leagues. Every summer, she borrowed $50 to take Swinney, his brothers and his friends to the beach.

During Swinney’s first year at Alabama, he watched the Crimson Tide play three times before he decided to try out for the team as a walk-on. He and 45 other candidates started the grueling walk-on program in January 1989, and two months later he was one of only two players left standing.

That summer, Swinney cleaned gutters and worked other odd jobs to save enough money to pay his share of the rent and utilities, as well as his tuition. When preseason camp started in August 1989, he went to Coleman Coliseum to get his class schedule. He was told the papers for his Pell grant and student loans hadn’t been filed. He had to pay $550 the next day or he wouldn’t be allowed to enroll in classes. If he wasn’t a student at Alabama, he couldn’t play on the football team.

Swinney called his mother at her job in Birmingham and told her the bad news. She went to her credit union for a loan, but was turned down. Neither had money in the bank, as they were still struggling to make ends meet.

Swinney was resigned to the fact that he would probably have to move back to Birmingham and work for a semester to save money for tuition. He wasn’t sure there would still be a spot for him on Alabama’s football team when he returned. Worse, his longtime girlfriend, Kathleen Bassett, whom he met in the first grade and fell in love with as a sixth-grader, was enrolling at Alabama. After two years apart, they planned to be together again.

Then, Swinney, who is strongly religious, asked for God’s help and received a miracle. He  was checking the mail outside his apartment and spotted a letter from the Discover card. He didn’t have a credit card but opened the letter. Inside, he found two blank checks. He called the toll-free number on the letter. Much to his surprise, Swinney was told he had a $1,000 credit line. He wrote one check for $550 to pay half of his tuition and one for $450 to pay his rent. He was left with $50.

Swinney spent the 1989 season on Alabama’s scout team. The next year, after the Crimson Tide’s receiver corps was troubled by injuries and inconsistency, he was was elevated to the travel squad. He had one catch for 18 yards in a 45-7 victory over Cincinnati on Nov. 17, 1990. The next season, Stallings, sensing Swinney’s plight and knowing his back story, awarded him a scholarship. He was hardly a star player, catching two passes for 15 yards as a junior and four for 48 yards as a senior, but he was a leader and solid contributor on special teams.

By the end of his college career, Swinney had reconciled with his father, who was there to see his son graduate from Alabama in 1993. Swinney convinced his father, who had remarried, to attend church to cut down and eventually stop drinking. After graduation, Stalling hired Swinney as a graduate assistant in 1993 and Swinney asked Kathleeen to marry him. He was making $498 a month. She was a school teacher. Both were getting their masters from Alabama. They lived off SpaghettiOs.

He found his mother an apartment and paid the rent and utilities until he married Larry McIntosh, an insurance salesman from Birmingham in 1998.
This is an inspirational story about faith and family.

“Here’s a family that was as broken as broken could be,” Swinney said. “There’s no family that could be more broken than this family. Now we’re a happy family, and it all comes through the grace of God, people overcoming addictions, and just love.”

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/ron-morris/article14359523.html#storylink=cpy

Swinney spent three years as a GA, then Stallings hired him as a full time assistant in 1996. In 2000, he was fired with the rest of Alabama coach Mike Dubose staff and spent two years leasing commercial real estate before he joined Tommy Bowden hired him on his staff at Clemson in 2003. When Bowden was fired midway through the 2008 season, the school named Swinney as interim coach.

It was originally supposed to be a temporary fix. But AD Terry Don Phillips saw something special in Swinney and named him the full time coach. Swinney has put Clemson in position to complete a fairy tale season this year against his alma matar. “I think God has a sense of humor,” Swinney said.

His only regret that his father will not be there to see his finest hour as a coach. Erv Swinney was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2007. Doctors took one third of a lung out and he underwent six bypass surgeries before finally losing a second fight with cancer in August. He is buried at Elmwood Cemetery in Birmingham, not far from Bryant’s grave.

His wife Kathleen gave him a medallion with his father’s finger prints on it as a remembrance of the circle of life.