Clawson earning his stripes as member of SMU coaching staff
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The Southern Methodist University Mustangs have a chance to carve out a special, landmark football season this year, and Hollidaysburg native Garrett Clawson has an opportunity to become a big part of it.
Clawson, 36, is a 2006 graduate of Hollidaysburg Area High School, where he earned an all-state selection as a kicker and went on to earn a Division I football scholarship to Temple University.
He eventually got into coaching, and after assistant coaching stints at both Robert Morris and Saint Francis University, Clawson accepted a job last season as a special teams quality control coach at Old Dominon University, where a large part of his duties was to analyze and break down game films and game tendencies of opposing teams for the NCAA Division I Monarchs.
This past spring, Clawson took a new but similar position as a senior quality control/special teams recruiting analyst at Southern Methodist University, which is based in Dallas and whose football team competes in the American Athletic Conference..
It was a positive career move for Clawson, as the 25th-ranked Mustangs will make their first-ever appearance in the AAU championship game on Saturday against 17th-ranked Tulane at Yulman Stadium in New Orleans. Kickoff is set for 4 p.m. on ABC.
A victory in the conference championship game could possibly propel SMU — which is currently riding an eight-game winning streak — into a prestigious New Year's Six bowl game.
"It really has been (a positive move),'' Clawson said about his new position at SMU, which sports a 10-2 overall record and an 8-0 mark in the AAC. "It's hard for anybody to complain when you're with a team that is on an eight-game winning streak and is playing some of the best football in the school's history.
"With where we are right now, we are going to make a run at the conference championship, and with bowl season around the corner, it's really exciting,'' Clawson added. "Obviously, as a first-year coach here and with all of this happening, I couldn't be happier right now. It's awesome.''
SMU head coach Rhett Lashlee -- who earlier this week agreed to a multi-year contract extension at SMU — said that Clawson has been a positive addition to the Mustangs' coaching staff this year.
"Garrett came to us before this season, and I've been really impressed with how detailed he is, how organized he is, and his overall knowledge of the game,'' Lashlee said of Clawson. "You can tell that Garrett has a really good feel for not only scheme, but also for how to get the right players into the right positions.''
SMU clinched a berth in the conference championship game by routing Navy, 59-14, in the Mustangs' regular-season finale last Saturday. The victory did not come without a high cost for SMU, however, as the Mustangs' starting quarterback, sophomore Preston Stone, was carted off the field after suffering a broken leg during the second quarter of the game. He threw for 322 yards and three touchdowns in less than half the game.
It was disclosed early this week that Stone will be out for the rest of this season, and the first quarterback in line for duty is redshirt freshman Kevin Jennings, who has thrown three touchdown passes this season.
"Preston has played great for us all year, but we've got a lot of confidence in Kevin,'' Lashlee said. "We've felt all along that we have two really good quarterbacks on this team.''
After transferring from Temple as a player, Clawson moved on to play Football College Subdivision (FCS) football at both Saint Francis and Robert Morris. At Robert Morris, Clawson became a football teammate and friend of Kyle Cooper, who is the special teams coordinator at SMU.
Cooper helped to open the door with the Mustangs for Clawson.
"After things went really well for me last year at Old Dominion in the special teams area, I was starting to hear from some other schools who were showing interest about me being part of their coaching staff,'' Clawson said. "It just so happened that one of the guys who I had played football with at Robert Morris, Kyle Cooper, has been coaching at SMU for awhile, and (prior to the 2022 season), the Mustangs had given him the responsibility of being their special teams coordinator.
"Just after spring ball had concluded this year, a position opened up on special teams at SMU to work with him in quality control, and after we started talking about it, the fit seemed right,'' Clawson added.
Clawson and Cooper were teammates on the 2010 Robert Morris squad that won the Northeast Conference championship, and the two have teamed up to handle all of the special teams duties at SMU this season.
"Kyle Cooper is excellent to work for,'' said Clawson, who also has some limited duties in recruiting at SMU. "He's got great energy, he loves the game, and he really cares about what he does as a coach. To me, that is one of the most important features that a person can have as a coach, and he does an incredible job with that. We mesh really well together as coaches, and we've done some good things here.''
Clawson and Cooper go back a long way. Along with being teammates at Robert Morris, they were graduate assistant coaches for two seasons, back in 2014 and 2015, with the Division III Westminster College football program in New Wilmington, Pa.
"I think he's got tremendous expertise on all things special teams,'' Cooper said of Clawson. "He obviously has tremendous insight on the special teams part of the game - the kicking, the punting, and the long-snapping, and he's a tireless worker, and an ultra competitor.
"Garrett is somebody who I've had a football coaching relationship with, and I knew his value to a special teams unit, so when I was named the special teams coordinator here at SMU, I thought of Garrett immediately,'' Cooper added.
The SMU football program was nationally acclaimed as a member of the since defunct Southwest Conference back in the mid-1980s, before the NCAA slapped the program with the proverbial death penalty after determining that SMU had been paying some of its players.
The penalty wiped out the entire 1987 and 1988 football seasons for SMU, and it took the school over two decades to get its football program to regain anything resembling firm footing again.
In the last decade, however, the SMU program has been on the rebound, and the Mustangs now have a chance to make a huge name for themselves and secure a berth in a high-profile bowl game by defeating Tulane (11-1, 8-0) in the conference title game.
SMU will also be one of three new teams -- along with Stanford and Cal -- to join the Atlantic Coast Conference in the 2024 season, and the Mustangs definitely want to do so as American Athletic Conference champions.
"Our guys have been selfless, and we've really gelled as a team this year,'' Cooper said. "I'm really excited for our players and really excited for SMU to have an opportunity to put it on the line and try for an American Conference championship on Saturday before we proceed to join the Atlantic Coast Conference next year.''