His heart in the game, UT's Clawson sticks with coaching

By Brooks Clark, news@knoxvillebiz.com Monday, April 21, 2008

At 26, Dave Clawson stood at a crossroads of his life. After his second season as quarterbacks coach at the University of Buffalo in 1992, he and most of the coaching staff had been purged. He was working for a friend, waiting tables at The Cooker Bar & Grill in Columbus, Ohio, for $2 an hour plus tips.

"That would have been a good time to get out of it," Clawson remembers. "I was interviewing all over. I'd take on many shifts in a row so I could go to visit a school and learn more football." The well-educated Clawson could have sought another career.

"But I missed it so much," he says. "I decided to give it another try." This week, University of Tennessee football fans will be debating his decision, after getting their first official look at Clawson's offense during the spring scrimmage Orange and White Game.

In January, UT football coach Phillip Fulmer introduced Clawson as Tennessee's new offensive coordinator, replacing David Cutcliffe, who had been

tapped by Duke University as its head coach. Stepping up to the podium in a dark suit, white shirt and orange-plaid tie, Clawson looked like a young, polished, extra-focused and no-nonsense Tom Cruise - not Cruise cocky, but sure of himself and his offensive theories.

"We're going to get the ball to our playmakers," promised Clawson. "We're going to put those guys in different positions and try to get them the ball in space, so they can do creative things. We want to be very multiple - a lot of formations, a lot of shifts."

Dave Clawson looks different, sounds different from many coaches at the big college football programs in the South. At 40, he is young. He learned his trade at smaller schools, not in the Southeastern Conference. His quick-paced, "no accent" western New York state accent is similar to that of his high school teammate, former Dallas Cowboy fullback-turned-announcer Daryl "Moose" Johnston.

Clawson's offensive system is certainly different, which is welcome news to bloggers and radio callers who have complained of predictability and sameness in the Vols attack. "It's his offense," said Fulmer, answering a pointed question about how free Clawson would be to make changes in the Tennessee system. "My job is to oversee."

From Little Ivy to The Cooker

Dave Clawson was born with steel in the blood. His grandfather worked five months short of 50 years at Bethlehem Steel in Johnstown, Pa. Dave's father, Ron, spent a few years with U.S. Steel, then entered the carbide graphite business, which makes the huge graphite electrodes for melting

scrap metal, acetylene gas for welding and other products for the steel industry. His mother, Sue, was a schoolteacher before she stayed at home with Dave, his younger brother and their two younger sisters. Clawson spent his early years in Youngstown, N.Y., a suburb of Niagara Falls, 45 minutes north of Buffalo. "It was a real sports town," says his father, noting his son started early in youth football, knothole league baseball and basketball. "He had a left-handed lay-up when he was in second grade."

In 1972, Ron was transferred to his company's home office in Pittsburgh, and the family moved to St. Mary's, Pa. "His first year at St. Mary's," Ron recalls, "he won a local Punt, Pass & Kick competition. He was 7 or 8." In 1980, the Clawsons moved back to Youngstown. At Lewiston-Porter High School, Dave and his brother were quarterbacks and football MVPs. As Dave thought about college, says Ron, "His goal was to go to the very best school he could get in and still play football." Dave chose Williams College, known as a "Little Ivy," in northwestern Massachusetts. Williams coach Dick Farley told Clawson he could play football

and basketball, which he did, as a shooting guard. Farley also recruited Clawson as a quarterback. "They let me throw the ball three times," Clawson recalls. He moved to defensive back, and at times also played receiver and returned punts.

"He was a very good athlete when he came here," his coach said. At a trim 6 feet, "he couldn't get arrested for assault and battery on anybody, but he

did understand the game and did a real good job for us." His junior year, Clawson blew out his knee, ripping his medial collateral ligament from the bone. Watching from the sidelines gave him a chance to learn strategy and prompted him to consider coaching.

"Whenever I go back to Williams, the one guy I always try and look up is Coach Farley," says Clawson, who graduated in 1989. Clawson began coaching quarterbacks and running backs at the State University of New York at Albany while pursuing a master's degree. "I bounced at a bar," he says, "and I taught elementary school P.E. at a Catholic school." After two years, his master's degree in hand, he moved to Buffalo, where he coached the defensive backs in a 3-7 season and the quarterbacks and

running backs in a disappointing 4-6 campaign that left most of the staff cashiered and delivered Clawson to The Cooker Bar & Grill.

From $3,500 a year to I-AA Coach of the Year

In spring 1993, Clawson weighed a few options and decided on Division I-AA Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., for the chance to learn offensive theory from head coach Hank Small.

"He was a coach out of his time," says Clawson. "Back then no one on the East Coast was doing what Small was doing. It was very modern. It was the West Coast offense before they called it the West Coast offense. He was lining up in spread sets, and that was normal. I wanted to learn how to throw the football. Coach Small knew quarterback play. He knew how to protect the quarterback in his offense."

Clawson volunteered for three months, then signed on as running backs coach for $3,500 a year. Lehigh paid for his housing. After one season, he was promoted to offensive coordinator and, in his sixth year in coaching, made more than $18,000.

Small's offensive system is the bedrock of the offensive philosophy Clawson has developed in the 15 years he started at Lehigh.

At every stop, Clawson kept pursuing the next wave of offensive theory. During his off-seasons, he took to schools on the cutting edge: "I liked visiting places that did more with less."

In 1997, while he was offensive coordinator at Villanova, Clawson spent three days studying the pass-happy offense of Brigham Young University coach LaVell Edwards and his assistant Norm Chow, who was recently offensive coordinator for the Tennessee Titans. "It was different terminology, but I recognized it as the same system I'd learned at Lehigh."

In Clawson's initial UT press conference, he stressed that "you have to adapt to your personnel. You can't be so system-rigid that you don't take advantage of the talent at hand."

At Villanova, in different seasons he coached receiver Brian Finneran, now with the Atlanta Falcons, and later running back Brian Westbrook, now with the Philadelphia Eagles. When Villanova had receiver Finneran, his senior season was a 4,000-yard aerial bombardment, as Finneran caught 96 passes and was named the top player in Division I-AA as the Wildcats went 12-1 and won the Atlantic 10 Conference.

When running back Westbrook was in the backfield, Villanova became a "mini-West Coast concept" balanced attack, in which Westbrook eventually became the first NCAA player ever to gain more than 1,000 yards rushing and receiving in a single season.

At the University of Richmond, Clawson went to a "spread concept" offense in 2005 to take advantage of multi-talented quarterback Stacy Tutt, who threw for 2,200 yards and ran for another 1,000 as the Spiders went 9-4 and won the Atlantic 10 Conference, winning Clawson his second I-AA Coach of the Year award.

In 2007, the University of Richmond had a talented offensive line and tailback, and Clawson morphed the offense into a power running team that gained 3,300 yards on the ground (2,400 in the air), won a school-record 11 games and made it to the I-AA semifinals, losing to eventual champion Appalachian State.

The call from UT

When Cutcliffe took the job at Duke, Fulmer called friends around the country looking for names of up-and-coming offensive minds.

Boston College athletic director Gene DiFilippo suggested Clawson. DiFilippo had been the athletic director at Villanova when Clawson was there, and Clawson had been a finalist for the Boston College head coaching job in 2006.

Fulmer called Clawson on Sunday, Jan. 6, flew him to Knoxville on a Monday, and they clicked. "I got a good feel from Coach Fulmer," Clawson says. "What made a difference was when I called people and it really came out how much people think of him as a human being."

On Thursday, he told Fulmer he'd take the job.

That Saturday morning, Clawson met the press in the Neyland-Thompson Sports Center, with next fall's quarterback, Jonathan Crompton, sitting among the reporters, as were Clawson's wife, Catherine, and their children, Courtney, 8, and Eric, 6.

"We're excited about becoming a part of the Knoxville community," said Clawson, whose family will join him here when school ends in Richmond.

In the meantime, Clawson has been commuting while taking on the task of re-creating the UT offense.

Amid the coaching turnover, UT had a less-than-perfect recruiting season, but Clawson was successful in signing a possible quarterback of the future, Casey Kelly from Sarasota, Fla. Kelly, disappointed when he heard that Cutcliffe was leaving, had given serious thought to Arizona State, but it turned out Kelly had attended a football camp at Richmond as a ninth-grader, when Kelly's father, Pat, was manager for the AAA Richmond Braves.

"I remembered watching the kid and thinking, 'Man this guy can throw the ball,' " Clawson said.

Kelly will weigh his options after the pro baseball draft in June, but for now it's UT.

Now Clawson has the daunting challenge of adapting his offensive system to the talents of the Volunteers. "At the heart of what we do is going to be a physical downhill running game with a strong fundamental base," says Clawson. "We want to line up in sets that give us the ability to spread the entire football field with the passing game. We want to be nonpredictable. We want to play to our strengths. We want to be balanced."

Brooks Clark is a freelance writer in Knoxville.

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