CLEMSON, S.C. — A voice, booming out and then echoing through a dining area, greets you from the top of the stairs inside Clemson’s new amusement park of a football complex.

“You ready?” Tigers defensive coordinator Brent Venables says, grinning the smile of an 8-year-old on Christmas morning. “C’mon, let’s go.”

After you reach the building’s second level, Venables turns and leads you down a hallway, abruptly cutting right to take a shortcut to his office through the plush team meeting room. Making smalltalk as you ascend some steps on the side of the room, you look up, expecting to see Venables a stair or two in front of you.

Nope. He’s 20 feet ahead, all the way across the room. He looks back, wondering what’s taking you so long.

It’s a reminder that the 46-year-old Venables has a gear that many humans do not possess. Good luck keeping pace.

This is the same guy whose pickup basketball performances are the stuff of local legend. Elbows, hard fouls, aggressive screens, diving to the floor for loose balls - Venables takes competitiveness to another level.

Once, someone asked him to take it down a notch.

“I’m just trying to get a sweat,” the middle-age player pleaded.

“This is just how I play!” Venables growled.

It’s also how he works.

“When he was recruiting me, I thought he was just a college football coach trying to seem really excited about recruiting,” linebacker Kendall Joseph said. “When I got to school, I saw he was still like that. I was like, ‘Oh, no, he’s just like that 24-7.

“It’s human nature to relax. With him, he never does relax.”

Head coach Dabo Swinney, certainly no stranger to bursts of energy, found another coach wired kinda like him.

“It never stops. He’s wide-open all the time,” Swinney said of Venables, whom he brought on in 2012 to pair on defense with a move toward a tempo offense. “He’s relentless about being great. He brings a passion every single day. He’s always looking for work. He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty.

“He’ll do anything. He’s not looking to get other people to do something for him. You need some chairs moved? He’s not waiting for someone else; he’s moving the chairs."

But Swinney has also learned that Venables, now entering his sixth season at Clemson, has an inner cool that balances his outward fire.

“He’s actually a very gentle soul and spirit,” Swinney said. “I think people are shocked by that. But he is really a sweet person.”

And it’s that side of Venables, a surprising level of vulnerability, that comes out once you catch up to him and sit down in his office.

He begins a 45-minute visit by talking about his initial struggle to connect with Swinney and his staff when he was hired in 2012. Venables played at Kansas State, staying close and then learning from legend Bill Snyder as a young coach.

A group of those K-State assistants later joined Bob Stoops when he was hired at Oklahoma. That’s where Venables worked as a coordinator from 1999-2011, growing in his knowledge and bolstering his resume.

When Swinney reached out with an opportunity at Clemson, it was, in Venables’ words, a “life-changing decision.” It removed him entirely from his comfort zone, especially considering Swinney explicitly would not let him bring any staff members with him to Clemson.

“I said, ‘We’ve got good coaches. You’re going to have to trust me,’” Swinney told 247Sports this week. “He took a major leap of faith. Honestly, I think he was a little bit scared.”

Venables isn’t kidding when he says that orange - rival Oklahoma State’s colors - was forbidden at OU, but the hue quickly became a regular fixture on his person at Clemson. That alone required an adjustment.

He then pointed at a bright orange chair in his office. (It may or may not glow in the dark.)

“You see that chair? I can’t imagine something like that 10 years ago,” he said. “Now I’m getting used to it. Sort of. It’s bright, now.”

And he described a disoriented feeling as he stood on the field prior to Clemson’s opener that first season against Auburn inside the Georgia Dome.

“Everything felt so new. I felt like a 13-year-old going to high school for a first day,” Venables said. “I thought, ‘Where am I? What is my purpose?’”

What he described as an “out-of-body experience” lasted the entire season, even though an 11-2 record was far from an on-field flop in Year 1.

Despite success, Venables was left so emotionally conflicted that he asked to meet with Swinney shortly after the season.

“That was a defining thing for me as a coach, because that’s what I had (at Kansas State and Oklahoma),” Venables said. “It was very intimate. For me, that’s important. It’s important to me to be fulfilled as a coach. To like what I’m doing, I’ve got to feel an intimacy and know that I’m fighting for something that isn’t just myself but my family.”

He believed it would take time and that some patience was required - but he feared whether the sides would ever connect. He wanted the head coach to know how important it was for him. Swinney understood, reassuring Venables that comfort would come in time.

And now? That heart-to-heart with Swinney feels like another lifetime ago.

“Man, he’s come a long way,” Swinney said. “I can’t believe he’s going into his sixth year. It’s been a blast.”

Winning, it turns out, is fun. Winning at the highest levels is even more amusing.

In 2015, the Tigers won the ACC title and fell just short of the national title. Venables was as a finalist for the Broyles Award, given annually to the country’s top assistant coach.

In 2016, Clemson and Venables went those final steps. The Tigers rallied to beat Alabama and win the school’s first national title since 1981. The Broyles Award is stationed on a shelf in Venables’ offices.

His best statistical defense was the 2014 group that finished No. 1 in yards per play and No. 3 in scoring. But more remarkably, he kept the defensive highly successful despite profound personnel losses in the next two cycles.

The Tigers had four defenders drafted in 2015, including first-rounders Vic Beasley and Stephone Anthony. In 2016, the Tigers had seven defenders selected, including four in the first two rounds.

In just those two classes, Clemson lost a total of five drafted defensive linemen - what might be the most difficult positions to replace in the sport.

And yet seven Tigers in 2016 landed on the All-ACC teams, including four on the first team. Freshman Dexter Lawrence was named the league’s top defensive newcomer.

Venables and Swinney largely credit recruiting with the sustainability of the defense, but Clemson has finished an average of 14th in 247Sports’ past five Team Composite Rankings. So it’s something more than recruiting.

After all, Clemson finished 10th in scoring defense and fifth in yards per play defense on the way to last season’s national title.

“Oh, he’s played a huge role (in the consistent success),” said Joseph, the linebacker who broke out last season to record 124 tackles as a redshirt sophomore. “It’s just his discipline and his demand for excellence, no matter who leaves or who the next guy is. The players don’t expect a dropoff. If you don’t expect a dropoff and you aren’t satisfied, then there won’t be a dropoff. And it comes, really, from his demand for greatness.”

Venables acknowledges that he’s hard on the players, just as he is with his own kids. It’s why he sometimes takes away the cellphones from his teen-age boys at 9:30 p.m.

“I think discipline is the strongest form of love that there is,” Venables said. “We all fight that discipline sometimes, but I think we all need it to be successful.”

He called Clemson under Swinney a “beautiful blend” of what he learned from Snyder as a player and coach, as well as that decade-plus with Stoops at Oklahoma.

“We’re not a bunch of perfect people, by any stretch, but we’re trying to do it the right way,” Venables said. “He’s built a staff that believes in that message and this culture. We’re going to put the players first. They believe we’re going to fight for him.

“He’s been very demanding. It’s not like we’re out here playing golf half the spring. We’re out here working. Sustaining success is harder than building it, to me. He’s that guy who is always looking for what’s next, how to improve and challenging us, daily, to do the same. We don’t want to be like everybody else.”

Particularly in the wake of Clemson’s national title, a question often pops up in association with Venables’ name: Will he eventually become a head coach? If so, when? And where?

It’s something Venables said that he’s entertained off and on throughout his career, going back to when he interviewed at Missouri just after winning his other national title, at Oklahoma in 2000.

But look at the setup where he is: Another raise is expected to take Venables to the precipice of $2 million per season. He says he loves running the many trails in what is one of the more beautiful college communities in the country. His son, Jake, a linebacker, has committed to play for the Tigers. His younger son, Tyler, is a blossoming high school star in the area. His younger daughters are immersed in the local little league scene.

In other words, it’s going to take something uniquely special to pry away Venables. Those close to Venables say that he’s even slow to show interest in eventually replacing Snyder at Kansas State because of how difficult it would be following the coach he calls “the Bear Bryant of Kansas State.”

Venables said he’s tracked peers’ career moves, seeing some regret their decision.

“Now they’re a head coach, making more money than what they were — but they’re totally miserable in their own skin,” Venables said. “I can run out of fingers counting those guys.

“Why would I rock this boat? I know what’s on the other side. It’s a difficult profession. A lot of things have to be just right. And, to me, it’s just right, right now. I have what so many others wish they had.”

Hey, just catch him if you can.