When Dabo Swinney officially introduced Wesley Goodwin as Clemson’s defensive coordinator following Goodwin’s promotion in December, the Tigers’ head coach publicly debuted the nickname that follows his longtime staffer around the team’s football facility.
“Weslichick, yeah,” Swinney said with a smile. “They’ve been calling him that a long time around here.”
The moniker is a play on the name of New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, the stoic football savant who’s won more Super Bowls than any head coach in NFL history. It’s a lofty comparison for Goodwin, who, at 37 years old, will officially start his first full season as an on-field assistant in one of college football’s premier jobs Friday when Clemson opens fall camp.
It also begs the question: How did he get the nickname?
Goodwin has been on Swinney’s staff off and on since Swinney got the head coaching job at Clemson in 2009, but Swinney isn’t the one who came up with it. And it wasn’t any of Swinney’s current or former staff members.
The culprit is Ryan Hollern, who’s now the college scouting coordinator for the New York Giants. Nearly two decades ago, Hollern and Goodwin were young coaches getting their start together in the profession.
As fate would have it, both were on Sylvester Croom’s staff at Mississippi State in the mid-2000s. Hollern was there first as a volunteer assistant under the previous regime but was kept on as a graduate assistant when Croom was hired in 2004. It was about that time that Goodwin found his way to Starkville initially as a student manager for Mississippi State’s baseball team, but Goodwin was soon recommended to the football staff and brought on as a volunteer student assistant in 2005.
“You could tell right away this guy was a really sharp, smart guy,” Hollern told The Clemson Insider in a phone interview.
Goodwin and Hollern, who was promoted to recruiting operations coordinator before eventually moving on to the NFL, worked together for a few years on a staff loaded with plenty of bright coaching minds. It included veteran defensive coordinator Ellis Johnson, offensive coordinator Woody McCorvey (now Swinney’s chief of staff), running backs coach Shane Beamer (now the head coach at South Carolina) and fellow graduate assistants Joe Judge (former Giants head coach and now Belichick’s quarterbacks coach), Jody Wright (now the offensive line coach at South Carolina) and Anthony Blevins (now an assistant with the Giants).
But even then, Hollern considered Goodwin among the brightest. Hollern started as an offensive graduate assistant at Mississippi State while Goodwin helped with Bulldogs’ defense, so Hollern said the two grew familiar with each other while interacting daily.
“I would say what stood out with Wesley is he was quiet at first, and he was a wiz on the computer,” Hollern said. “We did a lot of (our playbook) stuff in (Microsoft) Visio, which came from (the) Green Bay (Packers). I kind of took that over and then handed it off, and he picked that up instantly.”
It was Hollern’s first glimpse into Goodwin’s unique ability to diagram and dissect plays at warp speed, which Hollern said “has to be” Goodwin’s primary strength as a coach.
“I think there are certain individuals that really understand the X-and-O, the chess match, during the game and, for Wesley, what the offensive coordinator’s trying to do,” Hollern said. “Why is he coming out in this personnel? Why is he coming out in this formation with this down and distance? And being able to calculate that really before happens. That’s the hard part. That’s what separates coaches at the D-1 level and the NFL. You gather all this information these days with the analytics and being able to know who you have on the field, their strengths and weaknesses, how the other teams are trying to attack it and being a step ahead of the game. And that’s hard. It really is.
“He would echo stuff like, ‘Well, Ellis probably likes to do this because of this.’ Or ‘he’s going to want to do this because of this reason.’ It was kind of like almost you could see this guy is at the PhD level if that makes sense.”
Goodwin said he remembers Hollern first throwing out the nickname during their time working together. His initial reaction upon hearing it?
“Hey, that’s pretty cool,” Goodwin said.
Hollern is fuzzy on exactly when he initially blurted it out, but he vividly remembers introducing it to Swinney roughly a decade ago. At the time, Hollern was a combine scout for the New Orleans Saints, and Goodwin was on the Tigers’ staff as a defensive analyst. While visiting Clemson one fall to evaluate some of the Tigers’ draft-eligible players for the following year, he was introduced to Swinney by McCorvey, who had joined Swinney’s staff in an administrative role.
“I’m just like, ‘Hey, it’s great to meet you and see Coach McCorvey and Weslichick.’ And it just hit him,” Hollern recalled. “He just got this huge smile, looked at Coach McCorvey and was like, ‘Weslichik!’
“It sort of fits. Coach Belichick isn’t really a big guy. He’s kind of mild-mannered and keeps to himself but is super smart. Just ahead-of-the-game sharp. To me, that was just kind of a natural fit for Wesley. That’s kind of him, you know?”
Goodwin left Clemson in 2015 to be then-Arizona Cardinals coach Bruce Arians’ right-hand man off the field before returning to the program three years later to serve in a similar role for Brent Venables, who left in December after 10 seasons as Swinney’s defensive coordinator for his first head coaching job at Oklahoma. Swinney revealed then that other NFL teams have tried to lure Goodwin back to the professional ranks, but Hollern said he isn’t surprised his friend and former co-worker decided to wait it out for the chance to get on the field at Clemson.
“I know Wesley has always wanted to coach, and I think individuals make moves because it’s a better chance than wherever they’re at,” Hollern said. “But I think at a certain point, those three letters of NFL wear off if you’re not coaching or you have an opportunity to go coach in another place. To me, why wouldn’t you want to go and coach back at Clemson? It’s got one of the best environments and best teams going right now in college football and has been.”
Now Goodwin gets his chance to live up to the weighty moniker, if that’s even possible.
“To even be mentioned in that same breath (as Belichick), it’s truly an honor,” Goodwin said.
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