CLEMSON, S.C -- A mass of jubilant, rain-soaked fans pour onto the field, whooping and shouting in celebration of what is, arguably, the biggest regular-season win in recent Clemson history. The Tigers had just stuffed a crucial two-point conversion to defeat then-sixth-ranked Notre Dame, and as the clock ticks to zero, the cameras and fans swarm the Tigers' head coach. There, the Dabo Swinney show begins.

"We can give 'em a scholarship, we can give 'em room and board," Swinney yelled into a microphone. "But I can't give ya guts. This was a B.Y.O.G. game -- bring your own guts."

He roars on, building each answer to a frenzied crescendo. He's an ebullient madman. Think Howard Dean after the Iowa primary in 2004.

Back in the locker room, Swinney spends nearly a half-hour gushing over his team. He makes note of nearly every big play, every act of courage, every showcase of hustle. Then he dances, a middle-aged guy with an "Aw, shucks" demeanor and a choir-boy haircut, whipping a towel over his head and "getting low," as the kids would say. He's the classic lovable goofball. Think Clark Griswold in the "Vacation" movies.

How to properly contextualize Dabo Swinney?

He's unflinchingly competitive, a former walk-on at Alabama who has fought for every taste of success he has enjoyed.

Dabo Swinney was pumped up after Clemson's win over Notre Dame exclaiming it was a "B.Y.O.G. game -- bring your own guts." Tyler Smith/Getty Images

"Go to his house and shoot basketball," says New Orleans Saints running back C.J. Spiller, Swinney's first big catch on the Clemson recruiting trail. "He thinks he's Michael Jordan."

But ask Swinney about wins and losses and he begrudgingly accepts their importance but refuses to give his team's on-field record top billing.

His team thumped Miami so badly a few weeks ago that the Hurricanes fired their coach the next day, but at halftime Swinney was irate with his players, who he believed were letting Miami's trash talk derail their momentum. "I want to kill the opponent," Swinney said a few days later, "but I want to do it the right way."

Swinney has won 50 games in the past five seasons -- more than any coach except Nick Saban and Jimbo Fisher -- but he's rarely discussed among the greats.

In a time when canned coachspeak passes for commentary, Swinney is a blusterous whirlwind of raw emotion. In a world where Fisher and Saban and Urban Meyer have made micromanaging an art form, Swinney relishes surrounding himself with smart people and letting them do their jobs. In a game built on X's and O's, he's a coach driven by feel.

A few weeks after Swinney landed the job at Clemson as an interim coach who won over the fan base by beating rival South Carolina, he was invited to speak at a dinner. Sitting next to him was former Alabama coach Bill Curry, the man Swinney played for as a freshman.

"I'm going to give you some advice," Curry told him. "I'm going to tell you three things."

Swinney scrambled for a pen and a scrap of paper to jot down the words of wisdom.

Find a money manager, Curry told him. Swinney has been smart with money since, enough that he could generate millions for his foundation and shrug off a raise in favor of paying his assistants more.

Prioritize your family, Curry insisted. That was never a concern. Family is everything to Swinney. Before he agreed to interview former offensive coordinator Chad Morris for the job, he insisted on meeting Morris' wife and kids. The families went to dinner to talk about the job, then Swinney and Morris wrapped up the evening at Swinney's son's basketball game.

But the final thing on Curry's list, the thing that perhaps defines this current incarnation of Clemson football better than anything else, was even more obvious: "Be Dabo," Curry said.

Swinney is unlike any other coach in college football -- from how he got here to what he's done with the opportunity -- and his personality, his ability to simply be Dabo, has Clemson poised on the brink of a playoff berth.

"Every time he talks to the team, you know he's going to make something up, and it's going to be good," Clemson quarterback Deshaun Watson said. "Who wouldn't want to play for someone like that?"

Brent Venables' eyes light up, and the Clemson defensive coordinator pounds his fist into his palm in tune with the music's beat.

Bomp-bomp-bomp. And another one bites the dust.

Every Monday following a Clemson win, as the Tigers go through their flex period on the practice field, this is the song that blares through the speakers, a reminder of a job well done.

Nine hundred miles away, sitting in his office at Southern Methodist, Morris grins as he thinks back to those choreographed practices. He loved the Thursday soundtrack, which culminated with "Taking Care of Business" as the Tigers wrapped their week of grunt work.

This is the subtle brilliance of Swinney's operation. From the music at practice to the dancing in the locker room, it all feels fun, spontaneous, inspiring. And yet every facet is maniacally planned.

"He's incredibly detailed and organized in every facet, and he's a great visionary," Venables said. "He's routine oriented, and there's comfort in that."

Back in Alabama, after Swinney had been let go -- along with the rest of the staff -- as the Crimson Tide's receivers coach, he took a job in real estate. Turns out, he was a born salesman. He'd sift through market research and study demographic trends, then he'd stalk the right clientele and turn on that homespun charm, and every bit of carefully researched data was delivered like a parable from the Bible, inspiring and informative and utterly honest.

"He's a plan-oriented person," said Rich Wingo, a former Alabama assistant coach who hired Swinney as a leasing agent for AIG-Baker in 2001. "But he's always had his integrity."

Now Swinney sells Clemson, and he's every bit as passionate. He signed Spiller in 2006 while he was on a recruiting trip in Florida to see another player. Spiller was a hotshot recruit, and Clemson hadn't been on his radar, but Swinney, then the wide receivers coach, got to talking and it was impossible to ignore his enthusiasm. Swinney knew if he could just get Spiller to campus, he could seal the deal, so he pulled out a business card and drew up a contract on the back, asking Spiller to pledge a visit. Two witnesses inked their signatures next to Spiller's.

"He knew I was a man of my word," said Spiller, who blew off Alabama to take his final official visit at Clemson.

A few years later, under pressure from the administration, Tommy Bowden resigned as the Tigers' head coach, and while he had two former head coaches on his staff, Bowden recommended Swinney -- a man who'd never been so much as a coordinator -- get the interim job. He'd seen Swinney's energy, his enthusiasm and his love for Clemson. That was enough, Bowden thought.

In the seven years since, Swinney has worked hard to keep that balance -- that mix of careful planning and spontaneous joy -- and truth be told, the task is far from finished.

Swinney had a terrific team in 2011, ranked as high as fifth in the nation before the season crumbled down the stretch, fizzling out in spectacular fashion during a 70-33 drubbing at the hands of West Virginia in the Orange Bowl. Again in 2013, the Tigers were the prohibitive favorite to win the ACC Atlantic, but a No. 3 ranking wasn't enough to intimidate Florida State, which shredded the Tigers in Death Valley en route to its own national title.

After that FSU game, Swinney riled Seminoles fans by announcing that, in spite of the lopsided score, his team would've won five out of 10 matchups against Florida State that year. Was he crazy?

"We talk all the time about it's not who we play, it's how we play," Swinney explained. "It's not like there's any question of whether we're good enough."

What seemed laughable at the time was a subtle message to future Clemson teams. Just keep at it, guys. We'll get there. Swinney is the living embodiment of those inspirational posters with the cat hanging by a wire.

"I've always told people, I'm an overbeliever," Swinney said, and he's not exaggerating. This is a moniker nearly everyone close to him uses to describe his ethos.

Swinney most certainly believes in this team. He held his annual "state of the program" address before the season and announced his belief that Clemson would win every game. He has lashed out at media members daring to relive the past, and he has preached an unflinching focus on the task at hand. He shrugged off Clemson's No. 1 position in the initial College Football Playoff rankings, but he promised the world's largest pizza party for Tigers fans, should the playoff become a reality.

Swinney loves his quarterback ("a special talent") and he has predicted his offensive line will be among the nation's best ("people thought I was crazy"). He thinks his secondary is superb ("better than last year") and his defensive front is potentially dominant ("a lot of veteran guys").

It's a charm offensive. It's not aimed at convincing outsiders that Clemson belongs on the big stage but instead directed at the men inside the locker room who believe, unwaveringly, in their head coach's message.

"When we were in the top five in 2011 and 2013, things were more uptight here," guard Eric Mac Lain said. "Now we're just playing, having a great time. It's a stress-free work environment."

Steve Spurrier had a good idea his time at South Carolina was nearing an end last November.

For the previous five years, he'd toyed with Clemson in their annual rivalry game then reaped the rewards, "putting a little stuff in the paper," as Spurrier called his jabs at Swinney and the Tigers.

But last season, the tide turned. Playing with a torn ACL, Watson demolished South Carolina's defense, and the Tigers rolled to a 35-17 win. The writing was on the wall. There was a new king in town.

"We beat them five years in a row, and then they got us pretty good," said Spurrier, who stepped down as the Gamecocks' coach last month. "Dabo's done an excellent job there. What he's done is what you have to do in college football. He's set up a recruiting system. Clemson has great facilities. And they coach them well, too. They've got a good program going, and we need to match it at South Carolina."

This is the state of Clemson football, a program even its archnemesis now lauds as the standard within the state's borders, and Swinney is the architect. Clemson has won 10 games or more for four straight years, and a fifth seems all but assured in 2015. This year's team may be Swinney's masterpiece, the culmination of all that detail, all that passion, all those plans. It's the season Swinney has built toward for eight years, and it began with him letting go.

Three weeks before the 2015 season kicked off, Swinney's father, Ervil, died at his home in Pelham, Alabama.

Swinney's father was an alcoholic. That was the problem during those early years, when the family was broke and Swinney went off to college. He enrolled at Alabama with nothing but "a bedroom suit, a bed and a plastic Frosty the Snowman," Swinney recalled.

For two years, his mother shared that bed with him because she had nowhere else to go. He drifted apart from his father, taking on the responsibilities of his family his dad had ignored in favor of booze.

Wingo was the strength and conditioning coach at Alabama back in those days, and it was during the grueling summer workouts in the gym that he first heard Swinney's story and learned how tough the kid really was.

"I saw a side of Dabo nobody else saw," Wingo said. "You couldn't break him."

Swinney walked on at Alabama, earned a scholarship, won a national title, landed a gig as a graduate assistant and eventually became a full-time coach. He married his high school sweetheart and had three kids. His dad sobered up and remarried and their relationship thrived for more than a decade. Then Ervil was diagnosed with cancer. Swinney invited him to Clemson to get treatment and rest and recover and bond.

Dabo Swinney, No. 88, walked on then earned a scholarship at Alabama. RVR Photos/USA TODAY Sports

Here's the true test of Swinney's glass-half-full outlook. Cancer, he said, was a blessing.

"He would've never been [in Clemson] otherwise," Swinney said, "and we just had a lot of time as roommates."

Ervil was feeling better by August, living back in Alabama but planning a trip to Clemson for a visit. The family was encouraged, and then he was gone.

Swinney took a few days away from the team to go home and make funeral arrangements. He had saved a few voicemails from his dad and listens to them from time to time. The grief comes in waves, but it's always matched by an overwhelming joy. Swinney looks at his past -- the struggles and the losses -- and he says he's lucky.

"I always tell people, I know God is real because when I look back on my life, I see why," Swinney said. "I understand why things happen. That's one of the reasons I coach. Coaching gives me clarity on why I dealt with some of the things I did, and it allows me to connect with these young guys in their walk, and maybe give them some guidance."

Swinney is a man of faith, not in the sense that he leaves his destiny in the hands of a higher power, but in the knowledge that if he just hangs in there long enough, the answers will all become clear.

The day before Clemson's showdown with Notre Dame, Swinney was walking from his house, suitcase in hand, on his way to the team hotel. Just before he reached his car, his wife, Kathleen, ran outside carrying a package and yelling his name.

Two months earlier, Swinney was in a funeral home, halfheartedly listening to a sales pitch for various funeral packages. He picked one he thought would be nice, he buried his dad and he turned his attention back to football.

Now here was Kathleen, holding a box sent from the funeral home. Inside was a necklace with Ervil's thumbprint. Swinney had ordered one for each family member but had completely forgotten about it.

He fished the necklace out of the box and held it up in wonder. Then he looked at his wife.

"How about that?" he said.

And then he was at peace, certain that things were going to work out the way they were supposed to if he just followed the plan, just kept taking one more step toward that goal.

And then he went to the team hotel and delivered the speech he'd prepared. And then he coached his team to a season-defining win. And then he introduced the world to B.Y.O.G. And then he danced.

On Monday, the first song playing at practice was "Another One Bites the Dust" and Swinney charged across the field, ready for whatever comes next.