CLEMSON, S.C. -- Dabo Swinney was wiped. Four days as Clemson's interim coach had drained the guy whose tank is always full.

But when the board of trustees invites you to their breakfast, and you're a 38-year-old with no head-coaching experience who's presented the chance to lead a major program, you go. So Swinney arrived for the 7 a.m. breakfast on Oct. 17, 2008.

He smiled as board members he didn't know pledged their support. One tried to dispel a perception that the board only valued academics and said that Clemson could also excel athletically. Then, the trustee listed several schools that seemingly had achieved that balance. Florida was one, Georgia another.

Swinney immediately began fighting with himself, whether or not to respond.

"Literally in my mind, it was like, 'Do it. Nope, don't do it. Do it,' " he said recently in his office. "It was one of those battles where I was like, 'Well, this might be a short tenure.'

"But it was what I felt."

A few moments passed. Then, the interim coach made a statement that deserves a permanent place in Clemson lore.

"You know what?" Swinney told the group. "That's not my vision for Clemson at all. My vision is for this school and this school and this school to want to be like Clemson.

"I want to become the model."

Amazingly, no one choked on their bacon or spit out their grits.

"It was a wonderful moment," said Smythe McKissick, a trustee at the time and now chair of Clemson's board. "It was taken very, very well. It was so abundantly clear that he was a genuine person and a real leader.

"That was the beginning of what's been an incredible run."

Seven-and-a-half years later, Swinney is achieving his vision. Clemson is 56-12 in the past five seasons with three top-10 finishes, two Orange Bowl championships and last year's run to an ACC title and the College Football Playoff national title game. Swinney has signed six straight top-15 recruiting classes. The program has ranked in the top 10 percent of Academic Progress Rate scores for FBS programs in each of the past five seasons.

This spring, coaches from Arizona to Yale paraded through Clemson's offices, learning about what has worked there.

Yet if Clemson has indeed become a model program, it's an unusually soulful one.

We've been conditioned to equate elite football success with being all business, publicly padlocked, singularly driven, colorless and generally un-fun. Fair or unfair, the two most successful football organizations, the New England Patriots and Alabama Crimson Tide, feed this perception.

When Clemson stood cleat to cleat with Alabama before losing the CFP title game in January, it marked the end to the Tigers' remarkable 2015 story -- an open book, really, with a protagonist coach so animated that he can come off cartoonish before you realize he's totally for real.

Think of the main images from Clemson's run: the elaborate locker room dances after wins, with Swinney in the middle; a charged-up Swinney, rain-soaked and surrounded by fans after the Notre Dame game, putting BYOG (Bring Your Own Guts) into college football's glossary; Swinney delivering on his pizza promise to buy pies for tens of thousands of fans if Clemson made the playoff. Even his postgame blowup about Clemsoning came off more genuine than typical media exasperation.