Clemson coaching update: Meet the new faces joining Dabo’s 2026 staff
Clemson football’s worst season in 15 years, combined with one of the team’s analysts leaving for a head coaching job, opened up a lot of roles on staff.
Tigers coach Dabo Swinney used a mix of internal promotions and external hires to fill those support staff jobs heading into 2026, he announced Friday.
The headliner was Chad Morris, who replaced Garrett Riley as offensive coordinator and returns to the team for his second stint at OC.
But Swinney also fired his safeties coach, Mickey Conn, and had roughly 10 total staffers to replace after John Grass accepted Samford’s head coaching job and brought various Clemson coaches with him to the FCS school in Alabama.
Clemson athletic director Graham Neff said publicly last fall the football team could probably strike a “better balance” between internal hires and former players on staff vs. external hires and coaches with outside experience .
Swinney went with a mix of each on offense and defense. As such, some of his announced moves (especially internal promotions and former players returning) were met with mixed reactions from the Clemson fan base.
Here’s a rundown of Clemson’s newest staffers:
Offense: 3 former playcallers join Clemson
Morris will be Clemson’s offensive coordinator and won’t take the “quarterbacks coach” title. That’s because Swinney and Morris made the joint decision to promote Tajh Boyd to the team’s quarterbacks coach.
Boyd, Clemson’s all-time leading passer, previously starred as a quarterback under Morris at Clemson. He’d been working an assistant quarterbacks coach. Boyd will also continue to go out on the road recruiting while Morris stays in the office (something Boyd started doing last season while working under Riley).
Clemson, Swinney said, also promoted Lonnie Galloway from volunteer analyst to senior offensive analyst and made six external analyst hires: Mike Miller, Jacoby Ford, Artavis Scott, Brad Glenn and Freddie Kitchens (volunteer).
Ford and Scott are both former Tigers receivers who played under Swinney. Miller worked as a student coach at Clemson in 2015, focusing on quarterbacks, before successful stints at Alabama and Maryland as a grad assistant, position coach and playcaller.
Glenn, a Seneca native and Clemson graduate, was most recently the OC at Cincinnati. Between Miller, Glenn and Kitchens, Clemson added three former power-conference offensive coordinators to its offensive support staff.
Defense: A new approach for coaching DBs
Conn’s firing opened up a second lead assistant job on Clemson’s staff. Swinney and defensive coordinator Tom Allen took a different approach to filling that role.
Clemson promoted Thomas Allen, the former Indiana linebacker and Tom Allen’s son, to defensive passing game coordinator. Allen, formerly a defensive analyst, more or less assumed that role mid-season after the Tigers’ secondary had a shocking number of coverage busts at home against Duke.
“He’ll be a coordinator in the SEC, Big Ten, ACC or Big 12 before he’s 30,” Swinney said of Thomas Allen, 27. “He is a really, really gifted young coach. I’m thankful that we were able to keep him here at least for another year.”
In conjunction with Allen’s promotion, Clemson promoted Nolan Turner from analyst to safeties coach and hired Corico Wright away from Delaware to work as nickelbacks coach. Turner and Wright are both former players under Swinney.
Wright’s hire as nickelbacks coach indicates that former Tiger DeAndre McDaniel (who held that job last year, when the position group struggled) has been reassigned to a more general defensive analyst role.
All of those new secondary coaches will work alongside Mike Reed, Clemson’s longtime cornerbacks coach, who was retained for 2026. Former Clemson safety Jayron Kearse will also join as a student coach as he works on his degree.
What about strength and conditioning, special teams?
Earlier this year, Swinney announced former strength and conditioning coach Dennis Love would replace Joey Batson as lead strength and conditioning coach after the 2025 season. Love officially started working in that role this month.
The Tigers poached a strength coach from another ACC school to fill Love’s old position: Anthony Lazard of Stanford. Lazard played football at Iowa State and also worked in strength and conditioning roles at Boise State and Auburn.
Former Clemson special teams coordinator Will Gilchrist followed Grass to Stanford in what TigerIllustrated reported was a mutual parting of ways: Clemson and Swinney didn’t plan to retain Gilchrist, per the website’s reporting, and encouraged him to look for employment elsewhere.
Swinney, per TigerIllustrated, is expected to hire a veteran coach for his special teams coordinator role after the group struggled under Gilchrist in 2024-25.
“We’ve got a good plan on what we’re going to do there, but I’ll be making an announcement on that here sometime soon,” Swinney said.
