Clemson's football heart beats through Tajh Boyd

Dan Wolken | USA TODAY Sports

CLEMSON, S.C. – On a sticky night in late May, quarterback Tajh Boyd and one of his Clemson teammates drove 40 miles from campus and tried to blend in at a country music concert whose headline act reached the height of popularity when Boyd was 5 years old.

In the middle of an offseason where Johnny Manziel, the nation's top quarterback and reigning Heisman Trophy winner, went onstage with Wale and rubbed elbows with Drake, here was Boyd – a player who has thrown for more than 8,000 yards and 73 touchdowns – sweating through his "skinny jeans" and having to talk a security guard into arranging a backstage meeting with Darius Rucker.

"I've been trying to meet him for who knows how long," said Boyd, a proud and relatively recent country music convert. "I was like, 'Man, does anybody know him?' "

Eventually, Boyd got his meeting and Rucker's cell phone number (Despite the artist's very public allegiance to Clemson's arch-rival South Carolina, they now text each other frequently). But the contrast with Johnny Football's summer is impossible to overlook, especially for a quarterback who didn't start on his little league team, was told by Lane Kiffin that he wasn't good enough to play at Tennessee and was never nationally recognized as elite until he engineered a late drive to beat LSU in the Chick-fil-A Bowl last New Year's Eve.

But Boyd, a fifth-year senior who flirted with entering the NFL Draft last spring, doesn't mind his decidedly non-VIP lifestyle. While Manziel has been gallivanting around the country, basking in the spoils of his celebrity, Boyd has mostly been on campus, plotting to become the best quarterback in college football and lift Clemson into the national title discussion.

"The older you get, the more significant the position becomes, and you understand the team lives and dies with you," Boyd said. "That's why I didn't go to a few offseason things I (was invited to) this summer because I don't like missing time with my teammates. At the end of the day, if they can't trust me and rely on me to be there in different situations, I don't think we have anything special."

Of all the players who could steal the Heisman from Manziel this season, few come equipped with as many credentials, as much maturity or as good an offensive system as Boyd, whose relationship with coordinator Chad Morris has produced eye-popping numbers and 21 victories in the past two seasons.

Though Boyd's bona fides were questioned last week by South Carolina defensive end Jadeveon Clowney, who claimed the quarterback was "scared" the past two years against the Gamecocks, the game film of the Chick-fil-A Bowl tells all. Despite taking hit after hit after hit from a defense stacked with NFL talent, Boyd completed 36-of-50 passes and led Clemson back from an 11-point fourth quarter deficit, converting a 4th-and-16 on the final drive with a perfect throw to DeAndre Hopkins. On Sunday at the ACC Football Kickoff, Boyd said, "I'm not afraid of anybody."

In many ways, the Chick-Fil-A Bowl was a defining win for Clemson, whose renaissance began when Dabo Swinney – fresh off being elevated from interim head coach to full-time after the 2008 season – convinced Boyd to take a leap of faith and join a program that had mostly underachieved since winning the national championship in 1981.

"Going and sitting in Tajh's home, (then-Oregon coach Mike Bellotti) was hanging from a tree in the backyard with binoculars and (then-Ohio State coach Jim Tressel) was parked in the front yard waiting for me to leave," Swinney said. "And here I am – I just got the job, have zero track record, and I'm trying to get this guy to believe in me and what our vision was. It's been fun to watch it all play out because that's exactly what we've done. We've built a program around him."

Clicking with coach

It has been very much a long-term build, with multiple setbacks and a few doubts. Coming off high school ACL surgery that left him out of shape, Boyd redshirted his first year on campus and backed up Kyle Parker his second even as Clemson went 6-7. Finally in his third year Boyd became entrenched, lifting the Tigers to an 8-0 start and a top-10 national ranking.

The morning of the ninth game, Boyd turned on ESPN and saw his stats side-by-side with those of Cam Newton, who had won the Heisman a year earlier and led Auburn to a national title. That night, after an ugly 31-17 loss at Georgia Tech, he came home to find that fans had tossed eggs at his house. It sent both him and the team into somewhat of a spiral with just two victories in their final six games, including a 70-33 embarrassment in the Orange Bowl.

"I felt a little depressed, a little sad," he said. "This position is tough skin. You have to be able to just ride with some stuff."

The intensity of that spotlight is why Boyd's entire family including his parents, older sister and younger brother decided to move to Clemson with him from their home in Hampton, Va., and have remained there during his entire career.

Though such a move isn't the traditional approach – initially, Boyd wasn't sure it was a good idea – it made perfect sense to his father Tim. As a Boatswain's mate in the Navy who spent too much of his sons' first few years at sea, Tim Boyd got out of the military and became an independent maintenance man in the shipyard, a job that allowed him to work regular hours and spend the rest of his time working on his sons' athletic careers.

Tim Boyd never played football beyond high school, but as he watched the likes of Aaron Brooks, Ronald Curry and Michael Vick go from the 757 area code to the NFL, he wanted to do everything in his power to give his sons the same opportunity. When Tajh was 7 years old, Tim went online and ordered instructional videos for quarterbacks, started looking for summer camps to refine his skills and bought life-size rectangular targets for hours of practice.

Though he was named by his mother Carla for R&B singer Tajh Abdulsamad, a member of the late 1980s band "The Boys," he was groomed by his father to be a star.

"I remember my dad telling me pretty clearly, maybe in sixth grade, 'Do you want to be a local player or do you want to be a national player?' " Tajh Boyd said. "I had some natural gifts, but I knew that if I continued to work, things would turn my way."

Boyd landed a scholarship to West Virginia early in his high school career, but concerns about the offense led him to change his pledge to Tennessee. Boyd wanted badly to play for Phil Fulmer, but the school fired him and hired Kiffin, who didn't initially call Boyd to reaffirm the commitment, then promised to send an assistant to watch him play in the state championship game the following week. When nobody from Tennessee showed, Boyd got the message that he needed to look elsewhere.

That opened the door for Swinney, a super-energetic recruiter who connected with the family and didn't mind them moving close to campus. Tim Boyd, who said he makes a living painting and doing other odd jobs, has been a staple at practice almost daily ever since.

"I knew he wanted to enjoy his college career and I promised myself I wasn't going to be hanging over him and I would keep my distance so he could become a man and an adult through college," Tim Boyd said. "I'm not from (Virginia), we didn't have family there. So we moved here with the intentions of him having a place to come home to whenever he needed to get away from all that pressure. Maybe if he wasn't a quarterback we wouldn't have done that, but playing that position and the pressure behind that position we wanted to be there for him."

'So hungry'

Clemson's coaches say that even though the first two years were rocky at times, Tim Boyd respects his boundaries now. And the coaching staff's commitment to Tajh has never wavered. Even before he established himself a top-flight ACC quarterback in 2011, Swinney asked him to sit in on interviews for the open offensive coordinator position – something very few coaches would consider doing.

With Boyd's input, Clemson hired Morris, a former Texas high school coach who had coached just one year in college as Tulsa's offensive coordinator. Though Swinney says the Tigers' offense is traditional, Morris constantly disguises formations and runs it at a high tempo, sometimes reaching 100 or more plays per game. The system requires Boyd to make a series of reads and decisions both pre-snap and post-snap that can turn running plays into passes and vice-versa, and so far few teams have caught up to it.

Since Morris arrived, Clemson has averaged 475 yards of offense per game and Boyd has led the ACC in passing touchdowns both seasons. Last year, his quarterback rating of 165.6 bested Florida State's E.J. Manuel (also a native of the Hampton Roads area), who went 16th overall in the 2013 NFL Draft.

"He was so hungry to learn when I got here," Morris said. "He was wanting something; a breath of fresh air of something. This system has answers and the answers are built in, and if you operate within that system you're going to be successful. We put a lot on him, but I want the play to come natural to him if I've done my job. I expect him to have not just a good year, but an unbelievable year because he gets it, he understands it and understands more about how to manage the game than ever before."

The success nearly led to both of their departures. Morris was deeply involved in the head coaching searches at Texas Tech and N.C. State before returning to a $1.3 million annual contract at Clemson that makes him the nation's highest-paid assistant. Boyd, though disappointed in getting a third-round NFL draft grade, nearly turned pro anyway and would have jumped for sure if Morris left.

Instead, Boyd returns to Clemson already in possession of several school records and is threatening others. But the statistics, or even the possibility of getting in the Heisman conversation, isn't what drives him anymore.

"I've thrown for way more yards than Andrew Luck threw for at Stanford, but it's not about that," Boyd said. "The reason he gets the praise is because of how he manages the game, how effective he is within his system and how comfortable he looks out there. That's why he's a complete player, and that's the type of guys you look up to because of the steps they took every year to improve. I feel like I'm the best story in college football, but it's all about putting the proof out there and it will sort itself out."

Dan Wolken, a national college football reporter for USA TODAY Sports, is on Twitter @DanWolken.