Thad Turnipseed had a simple question when Clemson Coach Dabo Swinney, his old college teammate, tried to lure him to the Tigers’ staff in 2013: What do you want me to do?

“He said, ‘Thad, I don’t care what you do,’” Turnipseed said in a telephone interview this week. Come, Swinney urged his old friend, and make us better.

“‘I don’t care if you don’t do anything for a year,’” Turnipseed said Swinney told him. “‘Just come. Learn. Be around. When you see something that can make us better — make us better, go to the next thing.’”

So Turnipseed went. In a matter of days — “I don’t know if it was the first week, the second week,” he said — he had his new title: director of recruiting. “A couple months later, I was director of recruiting and external affairs,” he said. “I think that’s what the title says now.”