Clawson is returning to his roots
When Dave Clawson brings his Bowling Green squad to UB Stadium on Tuesday, it will be a homecoming.
Clawson, a native of Youngstown, was a two-sport athlete for Lewiston-Porter in the mid-80s and one of his first college coaching jobs was at the University at Buffalo in the early '90s. Winners of two of their last three games, the Falcons (3-5, 2-2 Mid-American Conference) are still in contention for the East Division title as they take on the Bulls (3-5, 1-3) in a pivotal league matchup at 7 p.m. Tuesday.
"There were a lot of great memories and I'm still in touch with a lot of the guys I played with back then," said Clawson, in his first season at Bowling Green. "They'll be at the game Tuesday night."
With Clawson at quarterback and Daryl Johnston at tailback, Lew-Port won the Niagara Frontier League championship in 1983. During Clawson's senior year in 1984, Lew-Port also won the NFL title under coach Jim Walker.
"He was very intense, very meticulous and very driven," Clawson said. "We had no business winning that league but he got us to overachieve as a coach. That was a great memory."
It was Walker who helped shaped Clawson's coaching philosophy.
"He always expected it to be important to us," Clawson said. "We could tell by how hard he worked that it was important to him and he expected the same commitment level from us. That's what you need to do as a coach. It needs to be more important to them than video games and going out at night. If you can make it important, at some point you're going to have success."
When Clawson was in high school, the late Pete Rao, who played for the Bulls from 1953-55, was a physical education teacher at Lew-Port and doubled as UB's offensive coordinator. Rao lured several Lew-Port players, including Pat Whitehead and Chris and Joe D'Amico, to the school.
"There was a real connection with Lew-Port and UB," Clawson said. "There were a lot of football players from Lew-Port who would go to UB because of Pete Rao. When I got out of college [Williams] I did a graduate assistantship at Albany and then getting the job at UB was a thrill. I was coming back home."
Times were different when Clawson started coaching at UB in 1991. UB was in the process of transitioning from Division III to Division I-AA. The Bulls played primarily a Division III schedule in Clawson's first season but by the next year they were playing the likes of Lafayette, Colgate and Central Florida. The Bulls posted a 4-6 record and set seven offensive records, including most points in a season (319).
"The program, as you see it today, was in its infancy," Clawson said. "We had a handful of scholarship players and if it was an in-state player he would get a certain amount and an out-of-state player would get a certain amount."
UB's practice fields and offices weren't exactly centralized back then.
"We had two different practice fields, we had a grass field on Main Street and the turf field at the old UB Stadium on campus," Clawson said. "We were kind of based out of the Main Street office but for recruiting we were in Alumni Arena. Inevitability every day there was something I needed in the one office that was in the other office so I would drive back and forth. There was an old gym and the locker room was downstairs and there was a little blocked- off room that had all the weights in it. You go outside down the stairs and that's where the old stadium was. It was the same place where they played in the '50s and '60s."
From UB Clawson made the rounds with coaching stints at Lehigh and Villanova before landing his first head coaching job at Fordham. He then moved on to Richmond where he coached the Spiders to the 2007 Division I-AA (now Football Championship Subdivision) championship and was named national Coach of the Year twice in the division.
In 2008, Clawson was named the offensive coordinator at Tennessee but he wasn't retained by new coach Lane Kiffin after head Phillip Fulmer was forced out. He was unemployed for just 12 days before Bowling Green came calling. It didn't take long for Clawson to come up with an offense that suits Freddie Barnes, the nation's leading receiver.
The offense is exciting and, in time, Clawson believes he can win big.
"Anytime you take a job, you don't take it because of what you think the next year will be like, you take it because of what you believe you can eventually build there," he said. "In the long term, I think we can build a championship here and we have players of that caliber already here."
Log into MyBuffalo to post a comment
MyBuffalo is the new social network from Buffalo.com. Your MyBuffalo account lets you comment on and rate stories at buffalonews.com. You can also head over to mybuffalo.com to share your blog posts, stories, photos, and videos with the community. Join now or learn more.
Reader comments